


The One Constant

by RedRowan



Series: The Boxer's Daughter [1]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Bisexual Female Character, Bisexual Matt Murdock, Canon Disabled Character, College, Community: daredevilkink, F/F, F/M, Female Matt Murdock, Friends to Lovers, Friendship/Love, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Law School, Male-Female Friendship, POV Bisexual Character, Pre-Season/Series 01, Rule 63, but they do make Mattie very very angry, girl!Matt Murdock, than an actual continuous narrative, the rape and underage are mostly off-screen, this is more a series of short stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-05-15 22:08:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 15
Words: 35,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5802028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedRowan/pseuds/RedRowan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first day of his freshman year, Foggy meets the hot blind girl who lives in the room next door.  And puts his foot in it by accidentally hitting on her.</p><p>Somehow, she becomes friends with him anyway.</p><p>Or:</p><p>Scenes from the Lives of Mattie Murdock and Foggy Nelson, Growing Up (Sort Of) and Attempting Adulthood</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Drops of Jupiter

September, Freshman year 

_She acts like summer and walks like rain,  
Reminds me that there’s time to change._

“Goddamn it! Come on!” Seriously, Ivy League funding, and Columbia can’t manage online course selections without crashing? “Load. Load!” A knock on the door barely registers, and Foggy just gives a rude “What?” in answer.

“Excuse me, is this room 310?” comes a female voice.

“No, 312.” Foggy looks up at the newcomer, and…damn. She’s short and slim, with dark hair cut bluntly around her jaw, and pale skin that makes Foggy think of cream and silk, or maybe creamy silk. And she’s rocking a pair of sunglasses, so she’s probably infinitely cooler than him.

“Damn,” she says. “Sorry, guess I miscounted.” She grins sheepishly, and Foggy nearly asks her right then and there if she’s taking a language course.

“Just look to your left.” Foggy says helpfully, and that’s when he sees the white cane in her hand. “Oh, uh, sorry.”

“What for?”

“You’re blind, right?”

“Uh, yeah, so they tell me,” she says drily. She points to her left. “So, this one?”

“Yeah, guess you’re my neighbor!” That came out a bit too eager, but she holds out her hand anyway, stepping into his room.

“Uh, Mattie Murdock.”

“Foggy Nelson.” He shakes her hand, as something twigs in his head. “Wait, Mattie Murdock? Are you - you’re not from Hell’s Kitchen, are you?”

“Yeah, born and raised.” She tilts her head a little defiantly. Hell’s Kitchen (Midtown West now) might be gentrifying, but she’s the same age as Foggy, which means she grew up in the middle of the same seediness that Foggy remembers.

“So am I! Yeah, I heard about you when you were a kid, what you did, saving that guy crossing the street.” Dial it back, Foggy.

She immediately gets flustered, pulling her keys out of her pocket, and retreating toward the door, her fingertips held out behind her to find the door frame.

“Yeah, I…I just did what anyone would have.”

“Bullshit. You are a hero.”

“I’m really not.” And there’s that smile again, and Foggy’s heart is doing something uncomfortable in his chest.

“Come on! You got your peepers knocked out saving that old dude.”

“They didn’t get knocked out.”

“Good, ‘cause that would be…a little freaky.” Shit. “But no offense.”

“Please, none taken.” She tucks her chin down for a second, her hair falling over her eyes, before turning her face to him. “Most people dance around me like I’m made of glass. I hate that.” She says it like a challenge, and Foggy meets it.

“Yeah, you’re just a girl, right? A really, really good-looking girl.” Oh, crap. She’s straightened her back, clearly on high alert now. “Oh, God, sorry, that was weird,” he says quickly. He’s pretty sure the only reason she hasn’t fled yet is that she can’t believe he actually said that. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to - I’m not trying anything.” She’s way out of his league anyway.

“It’s OK, I won’t read into it,” she says, thankfully grinning again. Foggy thinks that grin must be what’s making him stupid, because the words keep coming.

“Yeah, that must happen to you a lot, random guys hitting on you.”

“Yeah, It’s been known to happen,” she says, and Foggy doesn’t think he’s imagining the teasing tone that crept into her voice. She turns, putting her hand on the door frame. “I’m gonna go unpack now, but, uh, nice to meet you, and I’ll see you around.”

She’s gone, and it takes Foggy a minute to get the joke. From his laptop, the singer asks him if Venus blew his mind, and Foggy thinks he’s definitely in trouble if she’s going to be living next to him for a year.

He’s considering going after her and offering to do something manly like lift heavy objects for her when his laptop dings, reminding him of the _other_ girl he’d been thinking of before Mattie Murdock walked into his room.

“Oh, shit…” He checks the laptop, which is cheerfully telling him that registration is complete. “Yes!” Last spot in Punjabi goes to Foggy Nelson (and that spot better be right next to Lisa from Connecticut).

With that done, Foggy heads out to the coffee place where he’d agreed to meet up with his new roommate Jason (who is at the financial aid office trying to sort something out). As he passes 310’s open door, he sees Mattie bent over the bed, rooting through her duffel bag. The view is definitely spectacular.

Foggy knocks on the door, and she turns to him.

“Hey, it’s me.” Foggy realizes a half-second too late that that is hardly helpful to a blind girl. “I mean, uh, Foggy. From next door?”

“Oh, hi,” she says, that smile cutting straight through Foggy.

“So, uh, I’m heading out to meet up with my roommate, and I thought I might make up for being super-awkward at you by seeing if you wanted to come along and grab a cup of coffee with us?” Foggy manages to get the whole thing out before he loses his nerve.

“Oh, uh…” She actually looks surprised, but recovers. “Not super-awkward, really. But, yeah, coffee sounds great.”

“Awesome!” He glances around the room, which is empty except for Mattie and her bag. Her roommate hasn’t shown up yet, apparently. Mattie grabs her cane from beside the door. 

“Lead the way,” she says brightly.

There’s an awkward moment after she locks her door, when Foggy’s not sure how much he needs to say to direct her through the traffic in the hall. He decides on “everything,” which means he’s talking a mile a minute, and she’s laughing before they’re halfway down the stairs.

“You can tell me to stop if you want,” he says, mock-exasperated.

“No, it’s fine, it’s just - “ she’s still laughing “- you don’t need to actually count the steps for me!”

“OK, OK, I’ve never done this before!” he says, holding up his hands in a gesture he realizes she can’t see. “I’m holding up my hands. In surrender. Tell me how to do this.”

“Just - I dunno - tell me if I’m about to walk into something, and which way I need to go? I can manage the rest pretty well by myself.” She vaguely holds up her cane as evidence.

“Right. OK. I can do that,” he says, feeling like an idiot. There’s a guy coming up the stairs with a huge box in his arms, so Foggy reaches out and pulls Mattie to one side of the stairwell. She jumps when he touches her, and Foggy pulls his hand away like she’s burning.

“Shit, sorry.”

“No, it’s fine, it’s fine,” she says. “Just warn me if you’re going to do that, OK?”

“Yeah, sorry. Again. I’m pretty bad at this, huh?”

She pauses, and her hand moves as if she wanted to make a gesture, but then she just grips her cane tighter. 

“You’re trying,” she says gently. “I appreciate it, really. It’s more than most people would do.”

“That’s because most people suck.”

“That is also true.”

After that, Foggy manages to get Mattie to the coffee shop without any significant embarrassment on his part. Instead of telling her about every tiny step she needs to take, Foggy tells her about the activity around them: students and their parents hauling boxes and bags into the dorms, frosh groups marching past, a pair of very lost tourists who seem surprised at all the activity (Foggy helps direct the tourists to the Low Steps). Through the whole trip, Foggy has the song he’d been playing on his laptop running through his head. He glances at Mattie, and the song gets stuck on the line “she listens like spring, and she talks like June,” like a broken record. It’s going to be in his head all day.

Jason has a table in the middle of the coffee shop, and he waves at Foggy as they come in.

“Sounds crowded. Are there any free tables?” Mattie asks.

“Yeah, actually Jason’s already here, and he’s got a table, but it’s really crowded, and I’m….”

“Not sure I can find the right table without walking into someone?”

“Yeah.”

“Not a problem.” She grins, and holds out her hand to him. “Give me your elbow.” Foggy puts his elbow in her hand, and she wraps her fingers around his bicep. “Let’s go,” she says, sounding a lot more confident in Foggy’s ability to keep her safe than he is.

Her confidence does not turn out to be misplaced, because Foggy steers her to the table without incident or injury. He feels rather pleased with himself as he introduces Mattie to Jason, only to realize that the line for coffee is on the other side of the shop, and he’s going to have to repeat the whole process all over again if she comes with him.

“Hey, I’m going to grab our coffees, what do you want?” he says, hoping that she’ll take the out he’s offering.

“Oh, was that to me, or to Jason?” she says. 

“He’s definitely talking to you,” says Jason. “I’ve already got mine.”

“Foggy, you don’t have to do that, I’ll come with -“

“Nope, this is my apology coffee, so you’re just going to have to sit there and wait for it,” says Foggy.

“Apology coffee?” jumps in Jason.

“It’s really not worth an apology,” says Mattie, at the same time as Foggy says “I accidentally hit on her within five seconds of meeting her.”

“How do you accidentally hit on someone?” asks Jason.

“Talent,” says Foggy. “Mattie, coffee? No, sit, just tell me what you want.”

He extracts a request for a latte from her, and joins the line for coffee. By the time he gets back to the table, Jason is telling Mattie about his home in San Francisco, and she has a wistful look on her face.

“I’ve always wanted to go,” she’s saying as Foggy sets her latte down in front of her.

“Mattie, your coffee’s in front of you,” interjects Foggy.

“Oh, uh…” She gently brushes her fingers along the tabletop until she finds the coffee cup. “Thanks, Foggy.” She takes a sip as Jason rides over the interruption.

“You’ve never been?” 

“Never been outside New York,” she says, a rueful smile twisting the corner of her mouth.

“I’m going home for Thanksgiving, maybe you should come with me,” Jason says with an attitude that might be described as “charming” or “roguish”. Dammit. Foggy realizes that his roommate is not only very good-looking, but he’s much better at flirting than he is. “If your folks wouldn’t mind.”

Mattie hesitates for a moment, then lifts her coffee to her mouth.

“No,” she says quietly into her coffee cup. “I don’t have any plans for Thanksgiving. But I probably can’t afford the flight anyway.”

Jason also apparently has enough tact to know when to change the subject.

“So what about you? Did you grow up around here?”

“Mattie and I are from the same neighborhood, it turns out,” pipes up Foggy. “Hell’s Kitchen kids.”

“Midtown West,” Mattie corrects him sarcastically.

“Yeah? Whereabouts is that?” asks Jason.

“Below Times Square, on the West Side,” says Mattie. “It’s not very big.”

“Which leads to the question,” says Foggy, “how come we never ran into each other at school? Did you go to Beacon?”

“No, I went to Cathedral.” Mattie doesn’t seem inclined to offer more information, so Foggy rolls with it.

“Oh, that explains it,” says Foggy.

“What does that mean?” Jason butts in.

“It means,” says Foggy, “that Mattie here is a product of a fine Catholic education, while I had to slum it in the public system.”

Mattie snorts. “You made it to Columbia, so I think the public system worked out fine for you.”

“What about you, Jason?”

“Well, I was on the receiving end of some classic tiger parenting, so I went to prep school, and can’t really attest to California’s public school system.”

“Tiger…?” Mattie’s eyebrows crease in confusion. “Oh! You’re Asian!”

Jason laughs. “Yeah, I usually don’t have to tell people that. Oh, shit, sorry, was that rude? I really don’t want to say something offensive.”

Mattie shakes her head. “You’re fine.”

“Hey, can I ask you a question?”

“I wasn’t born blind,” she says automatically, hiding a tiny smirk with a delicate sip of coffee.

“How’d you - guess you get that question a lot.”

“Pretty much everyone asks. Except Foggy,” she says, and Foggy doesn’t think he imagines that she directs her smile at him (well, near him). “And the answer to your next question is ‘chemical spill when I was nine.’”

“Shit,” says Jason. Foggy waits for the rest of the story, but gets an awkward pause instead.

“What she’s not telling you is that she saved some old guy from the chemical spill,” says Foggy, trying to fill the void.

“Holy shit, really?”

“It’s not a big deal,” Mattie snaps, but then the flash of irritation (anger?) is gone. “I just don’t like talking about it.”

“Fair enough!” says Foggy. “Hey, did you guys see _Dark Knight_?”

The rest of the conversation consists of a dramatic retelling of _The Dark Knight_ , with additional commentary from J. Chan and F. Nelson, for Mattie’s benefit. (“I don’t really watch movies. I like records, though,” she says.) It is agreed that Foggy’s Batman voice is superior to Jason’s, although Mattie disputes the effectiveness of the Batman voice to begin with.

“You’re telling me that no-one can tell it’s just Bruce Wayne putting on a voice?”

“He also has a mask on!”

“Sighted people,” Mattie sighs, shaking her head.

After a lively debate over the morality and motivations of Batman, Foggy offers to take Mattie back to the dorm, as Jason has an engineering orientation thing to get to. On the way back, he asks about her taste in music (a lot of classic rock, apparently thanks to her father), which leads to her ribbing him over the Train song that had been playing when she’d knocked on his door, and it’s stuck in his head again ( _Tell me, did the wind sweep you off your feet?_ ).

“Admit it, you love it,” he says as they head down the hall on the third floor.

“I admit nothing,” she says, her eyes inscrutable behind her glasses, before the two of them burst out laughing.

The door to 310 is open, and there’s a pretty girl and an older man with matching prominent noses unpacking from a pile of bags that fills most of the room. 

“I think your roommate’s here,” says Foggy quietly.

“I noticed,” whispers Mattie. Her cane hits a bag that has been dropped next to the door. “Um, hello?”

“Oh! Are you my roommate?” squeals the girl, turning around. She has an accent straight out of a BBC show. “I’m Angela, Angela Howard-Keynes.” She thrusts her hand in front of Mattie.

“Yeah, I’m Mattie Murdock.” She smiles, but it’s polite rather than genuine, Foggy thinks, remembering the easy smile she’d had only a few minutes ago. That had been directed at him. Mattie holds out her own hand, six inches to the right of Angela’s. 

“What? Oh! You’re blind!”

“So they tell me,” says Mattie, her teeth showing in her smile. Foggy wonders how many times she’s had to use that line today, and feels guilty that she had to use it on him. Angela shakes Mattie’s hand gingerly, clasping with both hands.

“Well, it’s very nice to meet you, Mattie,” Angela says, enunciating carefully. Or maybe that’s how everyone talks in England. Foggy really hopes that’s just how they talk in England.

“Yes, lovely to meet you, Mattie,” says Angela’s father jovially, not over-enunciating. So it’s not just how they talk in England. Mattie offers him her hand, and he shakes it heartily. “I’m Angela’s father, Peter Howard-Keynes. I do apologize for the mess, we’ve only just brought everything up.”

“I really couldn’t tell,” says Mattie brightly. 

“Oh, er, of course,” says Peter awkwardly. “I can see that. Or, er -“

“Uh, this is Foggy Nelson,” Mattie interrupts, and gestures vaguely over her shoulder at him, “he lives next door in 312.”

“Hi,” says Exhibit A. More handshakes.

“Foggy?” says Angela, in a tone that suggests surprise, curiosity, and a hint of disdain.

“It’s better than Franklin,” says Foggy cheerfully. “Nobody’s called me that since my christening, anyway.”

“Well, Foggy,” says Peter, and Foggy can practically hear the quotation marks around his name, “why don’t we help the girls move some of these bags to make room for Mattie’s things?”

“Oh, I don’t have anything else,” says Mattie. “Just the stuff I have here.”

Angela and Peter eye the half-unpacked duffel bag on Mattie’s bed with skepticism, and Foggy thinks of the three bags he’d dragged into his own room this morning, with a promise from his parents that he could collect anything else from home that he decided he needed.

“Is that…everything?” says Angela.

“I’ve got some Braille textbooks that should be arriving later this week, but aside from that, yeah,” says Mattie, before she cocks her head in Foggy’s direction. “Unless someone’s stolen my laptop?”

“Nope, it’s on your desk,” he fires back, not missing a beat.

“Then yes, that’s everything.” Mattie’s chin lifts, and she waits for an answer. Peter hesitates, then puts a polite smile on his face. 

“Well, let’s clear some space for you then, eh?”

Foggy gets roped into helping move the (very heavy) bags away from Mattie’s side of the room (Mattie is told not to worry when she offers to help), resorting to piling them on top of each other. While he’s trying to balance one on top of another, he hears:

“Can I ask you a question?” from Angela.

“I wasn’t born blind,” says Mattie, in a voice of infinite patience. “And the answer to the next question is ‘chemical spill when I was nine.’” Foggy is on her side of the room, and she nudges his leg as he drags a bag past her (he doesn’t wonder, then, how she does it). He gets the message, and keeps his mouth shut.

“How horrid!” says Angela.

“Well, you seem to be coping remarkably,” says Peter. “And your parents are…comfortable with you coming to New York on your own? I mean, we were a little hesitant to let Angela come here after what happened over the summer, and given your situation…” He trails off into an awkward pause that Mattie blinks at behind her glasses.

“You mean the Jolly Green Giant tearing up Harlem?” says Foggy.

“Yeah, that actually doesn’t happen as much as you’d think, “ says Mattie. “And I’m from New York, so there really wasn’t any problem.”

“Well, I’m sure they’re very proud of you. Right-o,” Peter says, surveying the room, “that seems to be everything cleared. I should let you all get settled.” He kisses Angela’s cheek. “I’ll pick you up for dinner later.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“And it was lovely to meet both of you,” Peter says to Mattie and Foggy. “I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot of you.”

He’s gone after Mattie and Foggy say quick goodbyes, and Angela lets out a “Well!” as soon as he’s out the door.

“Parents can be so embarrassing, can’t they?” she says.

“Well, it’s nice of him to come all this way with you,” says Mattie cautiously.

“Yeah, my parents just gave me cab fare this morning,” says Foggy. He doesn’t mention how choked up his mom got as she hugged him goodbye, or the pride in his dad’s voice as he told the cabbie to take Foggy to the Columbia campus. Angela just waves her hand.

“He has meetings in New York every month,” she says disdainfully, “it was hardly out of his way.”

“What does he do?” asks Foggy, trying to avoid any particularly explosive topics.

“Finance,” is all Angela says, her voice dripping with disapproval. “What about your parents?”

“My parents own a hardware store. Actually, four of them, now.”

“I think that counts as a chain,” says Mattie.

“Yeah, something like that.”

“And what about you, Mattie?” says Angela. Mattie smiles, but there’s more to her expression that’s hidden behind her glasses.

“My dad was a boxer,” she says.

“Goodness! You know, I always thought boxing was so barbaric.”

Mattie’s smile widens into something wolfish. “Only when you do it right.”

Foggy has to excuse himself a few minutes later to go to his orientation meeting, and he doesn’t see Mattie all afternoon. Over dinner, Jason pointedly asks how it went with their hot blind neighbor, and Foggy doesn’t realize that he spends ten solid minutes talking about her before Jason interrupts.

“So, are you going to ask her out?”

“Don’t think that would be a good idea, since she’d probably think I’m a creep after this morning.”

“Yeah, does this ‘accidentally hitting on someone’ thing happen to you a lot?”

Foggy doesn’t mention that he also accidentally hit on Jason this morning, since that had gone right over the straight boy’s head.

“More than you’d think,” Foggy says instead.

“But you are interested?”

“You’ve seen her, right?”

“OK, I hear you. I was kind of hoping I could get in there, but, hey, bros before hos, man. You should go for it.”

Foggy remembers how Mattie had laughed at Jason’s jokes earlier, and thinks she might have a different opinion on the matter, but when they get back to the dorm, Mattie’s just unlocking the door to 310, and Jason casually shoves Foggy in her direction before disappearing into 312.

“Hey, Mattie, it’s me, uh, Foggy? From next door?”

“As opposed to all the other Foggies I met today?” she says with a grin. She pushes the door open. “C’mon in.”

Foggy is a little relieved that Angela is nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s Angela?”

“Dinner with her dad,” says Mattie, her voice carefully neutral.

“Two of you settling in?”

“Yeah, we’re good,” lies Mattie.

“That bad, huh?”

Mattie laughs, but shakes her head in frustration. “No, it's - she kept going on about how _brave_ I was being coming here, how I wouldn’t have to lift a _finger_ around here, how I _had_ to try on some of her clothes and let her do my makeup.”

“What a bitch,” says Foggy without venom as he sits at the foot of her bed.

“Ugh!” Mattie is pulling off her sweater, the t-shirt underneath hiking up to show a very trim waist. “I know, I know she means well, but I just can’t stand -“

“Being treated like you’re made of glass?” Foggy recalls from this morning.

“Yeah.” She folds up the sweater, and it disappears into the dresser next to her bed. Foggy glances at the duffel bag tucked away next to it, and thinks that the dresser can’t be very full. Mattie sits at the other end of the bed. “At least I got to educate her on some of the finer points of boxing.”

“Please tell me that doesn’t mean that you punched her.”

Mattie’s head whips around to him, a look of alarm on her face for just a moment. “No, just had to explain what my dad’s record meant.”

“Battlin’ Jack Murdock, right? I remember people used to talk about his fights in my parents’ store.” Foggy thinks he remembers another part to the story, too, and he thinks back to any time someone has asked about Mattie’s parents, and how she’d evaded ever talking about them directly.

“Yeah.” Mattie’s eyes are hidden behind her glasses, but her expression has a sadness to it that makes Foggy want to reach out to her. “He lost more than he won, but he could take a punch,” she says softly. “Always got back up.”

“When did he pass?” asks Foggy quietly, and Mattie’s chin raises, and her jaw tightens, and he knows that he got it right.

“When I was ten,” she says. She doesn’t elaborate. Foggy doesn’t ask.

“I’m sorry. So you live with your mom, then?”

She shakes her head. “My mom hasn’t been in the picture for a while.”

“So where do you live?”

“Here, now,” she says. “But until this morning, St Agnes Orphanage.”

“Wow,” says Foggy, and Mattie’s head tilts in the way that he’s learning to read as defiance. “That sounds so…Dickensian. Like, they didn’t even try to soften it by calling it a group home or something?”

“I think when it’s run by nuns, it’s automatically an orphanage.”

“You were raised by nuns?”

“It’s really not as bad as it sounds.”

“Because it sounds like something out of the sixties.”

“Well, parts of the building haven’t been renovated since then,” says Mattie, the corner of her mouth tilting up. “But no, they’re good people.”

“You gonna miss them?”

“No,” she says quietly. “It wasn’t…home, you know? Just a place I lived.” Foggy wonders if that’s the saddest thing he’s ever heard, and all he wants to do is wrap his arms around this girl, but she’d probably just think he was trying to get in her pants. “Look, can I ask you a favor?”

“Sure.” Anything, he thinks.

“Can you…not mention any of this to people? Like, the accident, or my dad, or St Agnes?”

“Yeah, of course. It’s your business.”

“Thanks. I just…my eyes aren’t the only reason people treat me like glass, you know? And I’d really rather not deal with that today. More than usual, anyway.”

“No problem,” he says, and he realizes what today must mean to her - a new start, away from the baggage of being the blind orphan girl.

“Thanks,” she repeats.

“Any time.” The silence stretches between them, until Foggy remembers something Jason had said. “Hey, Jason said someone’s having a party up on the fifth floor, you want to go check it out?”

She breaks into a smile. “Hell yeah.”

“Awesome!” He reaches out and pulls her to her feet. She doesn’t flinch away. “You can be my wingman!”

“Why do I have to be your wingman? Make Jason be your wingman.”

“Jason is better-looking than me, and that is not how this works.” They’re heading out the door, Mattie’s cane in hand.

“So you’re saying you’re better-looking than me?” She locks the door and Foggy pounds on 312’s door to see if Jason’s still there.

“No, I’m saying that girls will want to talk to you, and then you can introduce them to me.”

“Why would I let them talk to you if they’re already talking to me?”

The door to 312 opens, and Jason appears just as Foggy says, “Because you’re - wait, are you into girls?”

Mattie smirks at him. “Only half the time.”

“I came into this conversation at the wrong time,” says Jason.

“Foggy’s going to be my wingman,” Mattie tells him.

“Mazel tov?”

“We’re heading upstairs to check out the party,” says Foggy. “There is some dispute as to who is being whose wingman.”

“By your logic, you should be mine,” says Mattie. “You did say I was really, really good-looking.” 

Jason’s eyebrows hike up toward his hairline as he blinks at Foggy.

“That is taken out of context,” says Foggy, starting down the hall with Mattie beside him. “And I thought we were never mentioning that ever again. I gave you an apology latte!”

“I didn’t know apology lattes were also silencing lattes.”

“There’s a tacit agreement to apology lattes.”

“Was that written on the foam? I didn’t see anything.”

Both Foggy and Jason groan at that one as Mattie smiles brightly, and Foggy’s stomach flip flops again, and he wonders how long it will be before it stops doing that around her. They keep bickering all the way up to the fifth floor, but Foggy loses Mattie quickly when a hot guy drifts past and sweeps her away toward some rumoured alcohol. Foggy tries to talk to the people around him, but his eye keeps getting dragged back to Mattie Murdock, flirting with the best-looking people in the room, making him imagine a girl with drops of Jupiter in her hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The whole fic is inspired by this prompt at the daredevilkinkmeme (the original fill will show up as Chapter 2):
> 
> http://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/6237.html?thread=11493725#cmt11493725


	2. Facial Expressions

December, Freshman year

It’s past midnight, and Foggy has his music on, so he thinks he imagines the knocking. 

“Hey, Foggy?” Mattie’s voice comes through the door.

“Hey!” He pulls open the door. “What’s up?”

She’s got her jacket on, and her backpack on her shoulder, and the crease between her eyebrows that says she’s annoyed at something. Hopefully not that she’s been knocking on his door for a while. She shifts from one foot to the other, adjusting her grip on her cane.

“Oh, um…do you have a blanket I can borrow?” she asks.

“Uh, yeah. Sure. Why?”

She’s about to answer when Foggy hears it - the unmistakeable rhythmic sound of fun times being had in Mattie’s room next door. Mattie runs her hand over her face in the gesture Foggy has dubbed “Mattie Murdock is done with your shit,” and makes an irritated little noise.

“That.”

“Angela sexiled you?” he says, grinning.

“Yeah,” she says, not amused, then shakes her head. “I’m just gonna crash in the common room, and I’d really appreciate not having to sleep under my jacket.”

Foggy can’t have that.

“Nah, c’mon in, you can crash here.” He reaches out to touch her shoulder, but she waves a hand in front of her.

“It’s OK, seriously, I can sleep on one of the couches -“

“And get woken up every five minutes by every asshole pulling an all-nighter?” Exams have just started, and there’s always someone trying to brew coffee or make ramen at three in the morning. “Seriously, you look exhausted, you need a decent night’s sleep.” He gently touches her shoulder (he’s learned over the past few months how not to startle her) and guides her into his room. “Not to mention I’m pretty sure those couches haven’t been cleaned since September.” Mattie’s nose wrinkles in agreement as he closes the door behind her. 

“That’s…almost certainly true,” she says, a grin tugging at the corner of her mouth (that mouth…). She reaches out and finds Foggy’s nightstand with her cane, and puts her backpack down beside it.

“Good. So, you can take my bed, and I’ll take Jason’s until he gets back.”

Mattie straightens up and turns to face him.

“Wait, I’m not kicking you out of your own bed, Foggy. And what are you going to do when he gets back?”

“Sleep on the floor,” he says, reasonably. He thought this was obvious, what with the oh-so-in-demand extra blanket being available.

That earns him the confused look on her face that says she can’t believe what just came out of his mouth. It’s the same look she gave him back in September, back when they first met. ("You’re just a girl, right? A really, really good-looking girl. Oh, God, sorry, that was weird.")

“Don’t be an idiot, Foggy.”

“Well, I’d spoon with Jason, but we haven’t quite reached that level of friendship yet.”

“Fine. OK.” She presses her lips together, the way she does when she’s looking for an answer she knows is there. “Share with me, then, just don’t sleep on the floor, please.”

Foggy thinks his brain might have short-circuited, because it’s now stuck on a loop of “no, it’s fine, it’s totally fine, this is just fine.” They’re friends, and friends can platonically share a (very small) bed.

“I promise I’ll be a gentleman,” she says.

“Good, because my virtue is precious to me,” Foggy deadpans. Mattie grins, and Foggy’s stomach tightens. “Do you want to borrow something to sleep in?”

“Nah, I’m good, thanks.”

She leans her cane against the wall next to her backpack, and sits on his bed to take off her shoes and jacket, which she tucks away with the rest of her stuff. Her glasses are placed carefully on the nightstand, and her belt is slipped out from her jeans, wound around her hand, and laid on top of the pile. Foggy clears his laptop off the bed, closing it and leaving it on his desk, and wonders exactly how much clothing she’s going to take off. The answer turns out to be “none”, as she slips into his bed fully clothed in her jeans and t-shirt. Foggy doesn’t know if he should be relieved or disappointed.

“I’ll get the light,” he says.

“Really doesn’t matter to me.”

Foggy’s still getting used to Mattie’s blind jokes, so he just chuckles quietly as he flicks off the lights and makes his way back to the bed in the dark. He’s already in sweatpants and a t-shirt, and while he’d normally take his shirt off to sleep, he thinks it best to follow Mattie’s lead. He climbs in next to her, not quite sure where he can put his hands, when he hears a tiny “shit” from her, and she sits up straight. There’s a quiet rustling, then the sound of cloth landing on cloth somewhere in the vicinity of the nightstand.

“Forgot to take my bra off,” she says, lying back down. Because knowing that makes everything better for Foggy.

He feels her curl onto her side, her back to him, so he turns too, keeping his hands to himself, squeezed between his chest and her back. There’s not much room, and while he knows for a fact that both of them have experience fitting two bodies into these narrow beds, he doesn’t think the lessons learned really apply in this situation. Speaking of two bodies on one bed -

“Oh, my God, are they still going at it?” he whispers, as he hears Angela’s voice getting higher and higher (and louder and louder).

“Yup,” Mattie whispers back grimly.

“Should we time them or something?”

Mattie’s body shakes with a quiet laugh, but then she yawns.

“Maybe next time,” she says, adjusting herself against the mattress. Foggy feels her shoulder blade move against his knuckles. “Hey, Foggy, can you move your hand? It’s kinda digging into me.”

Foggy pulls his hand out from between them, but has no idea where he can put it. She must feel him hesitate, because she gives a little huff, reaches behind her, and pulls his arm around her waist. This has the added result of pulling him flush against her back, her (perfect) butt cradled in his lap. Great. Now he’s going to be terrified of moving all night, and the soundtrack provided by Angela and friend is not helping. But Mattie seems to relax with his arm around her, and her hand on his will at least keep his arm from shifting up or down into the danger areas. He shifts his fingers so that they’re laced with hers, and listens to her breathing slow, and wonders how on earth she can sleep with Angela wailing like a banshee next door.

When he wakes up, he’s pleased to note that he has not accidentally touched Mattie inappropriately during the night. Their fingers are still intertwined on her stomach, so he reaches across her with his other arm to grab his phone and check the time. 9:16, which is entirely too early for any self-respecting undergrad to be awake. He puts the phone down, and glances at her, curled up and nestled against him. Like a tiny kitten, he thinks, the image making him feel warm and cozy, partly because Mattie would hate it. He resolves to call her that as much as possible.

“Hey,” comes Jason’s voice from the other side of the room.

“Hey,” whispers Foggy, holding his finger to his lips, and pointing down at Mattie.

“Did you two finally…?” Jason raises his eyebrows suggestively. Foggy shakes his head.

“Nah, man, we’re not like that,” he whispers, but apparently, it’s too loud, because Mattie shifts and opens her eyes, and for once, Foggy doesn’t know what the look on her face is saying.


	3. Sunshine

September, Sophomore year

Foggy would really rather be anywhere but here right now.

Generally speaking, he has no problem with two girls flirting in front of him. He and Mattie have spent the last year perfecting their wingman strategies, so he’s seen a lot of it. Only, he wishes that he had a discreet way to excuse himself when Mattie really starts putting the moves on girls, because he has moved past “automatically getting turned on”, and is now into the “this is just awkward” phase of their relationship. 

He draws the line at watching Mattie touch girls’ faces (which he can tell is imminent), so he flops down on the ground, and stares at the sky. It’s a beautiful day, probably one of the last warm days of summer, and it had been his brilliant idea to hang out on the Steps, and possibly partake of some day-drinking, but when Mattie had shown up after class, she had Anita (who looks like the offspring of Halle Berry and Beyonce) in tow, and now he’s third-wheeling while Anita giggles under Mattie’s fingertips.

Foggy glances over at them, and yes, they look great together, like something out of a ridiculously wholesome lesbian magazine.

He knows exactly how this will play out - the gentle strokes of fingertips along eyebrows, teasing brushes against cheekbones, and the (perfectly calculated) lean in as she slowly slides her thumb across the Anita’s lips. He doubts Mattie will try to kiss her here with so many people around (Mattie has some sense of decorum, occasionally), so he guesses he can hold out until the face-touching thing is over. He pulls out his iPod and turns on some music as he takes a nip from the water bottle he’d filled with vodka and orange juice (mostly vodka).

Anita’s phone rings, and she’s gone in a flash, pressing a shy kiss to Mattie’s cheek with a quick apology. Mattie sighs, and Foggy takes out his headphones and pokes her side so she knows that he’s still here. She tosses him a smug grin over her shoulder, and gracefully settles herself on the ground as he guides her so that she’s resting with her head on Foggy’s stomach. She’s practically purring, stretching in the warmth of the sun, and Foggy resists the temptation to scratch her head like a cat. Instead, he says “Here you go, kitten,” using the nickname she pretends to hate, and taps her hand with the bottle, and she takes it from him.

“Sorry, I just thought she’d like to hang out,” she says as she sniffs at the bottle before taking a sip.

“Nah, it’s all good. She’s hot, you should go for it.”

“Totally did. We’re hanging out tomorrow night.” She holds out her fist, and Foggy grins as he bumps it with his. He taught her fist bumps last year, and it always makes his heart swell a little with pride.

“Nice!” he crows. “Face-touching for the win!”

“You realize that’s not the only reason I do it, right?”

“Uh, that seems to be the only time that you do it.” He takes the bottle out of her hand for another drink. “I’m starting to think that the whole thing is a lie sold to us by Hollywood that you’re using for your own gain.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s offensive to the disabled,” she says mildly. She holds up her hand for the bottle, and Foggy presses it into her grip.

“Sue me, Murdock.”

“Bring it, Nelson.” She takes a swig from the bottle - they’re about two-thirds done now, and Foggy’s starting to feel the combined effects of vodka and sunshine making him sleepy.

“No, but seriously, you only do it when you’re trying to get in somebody’s pants.”

“Yeah, ‘cause most people find it weird, and it makes them uncomfortable. Unless they’re, you know, interested.” She gives a sort of shrug, which ends up spilling a little of the vodka and orange juice on the ground. Foggy rescues the bottle from her and takes a drink.

“That why you’ve never asked me?” he says, feeling oddly tense.

“What?” She turns her face to him, eyebrows furrowing.

“You’ve never asked me,” he repeats.

“Oh.” She pauses, probably thinking over the last year. “Guess you’re right. Huh.”

“Never been curious?” Foggy’s not sure why he’s hung up on this, but he plans on blaming the vodka anyway.

“About you?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure.” She shrugs again. “But, I mean, I’ve got an image -“ she gestures vaguely at her ear, “ - of you in my head anyway.” She holds out her hand for the bottle.

“Finish it,” says Foggy as he places it in her hand. “So you’ve never wanted to get your hands all up on this?”

She drains the bottle, then pauses. Suddenly, Foggy is hit in the nose with her palm, her hand flapping loosely all over his face like some sort of dying fish.

“Ow! Stop it!” They’re both tipsy and laughing as he fends off her attack.

“There, happy?” she says, sitting up with a laugh still clinging to her mouth.

“I’m pretty sure all you got from that is that I have a nose.”

“Important information. I did not know that about you,” she says cheekily. The alcohol and the laughter has flushed her cheeks, and her dark hair is glowing blood-red in the sun, and she still catches him off-guard sometimes, with how pretty she is.

“C’mon, you know you want to.” He waggles his eyebrows. “I’m waggling my eyebrows, just so you know.” She laughs at that, and he starts poking her arm. “Do it…do it…do it…” Mattie doesn’t have siblings, so she breaks easily.

“Fine! Fine! I’ll do it.” She slaps his hand away, and turns so that she’s sitting cross-legged facing him. She holds up both hands and makes the universal gesture for “come here” with them. “C’mere and take my hands.” Foggy sits up opposite her and puts his hands on hers. “Put my hands on your face.”

“You don’t usually have people do this,” Foggy points out.

“You’re not most people,” she says quietly, and Foggy’s not sure how to take that. He presses her fingertips to his face, and she slides her hands forward so her palms are cupping his cheeks, her fingers sliding up toward his temples. His own hands drift down to rest on her forearms, and there’s a moment of complete and utter stillness between the two of them.

“I’m going to start at your forehead,” she says, her fingertips gently gliding up to his hairline.

“I know how this goes, you don’t have to narrate.”

“Fine, smartass, you tell me what to do.” She presses a forefinger hard into the centre of his forehead for emphasis, pushing his head back a little.

“OK…” Foggy takes a deep breath (why does he need to steady himself?). “You start at the forehead, and then you move down until you reach the eyebrows…” Mattie’s fingertips follow his directions, gently brushing over every feature he names, a grin tugging at her lips. By the time she’s reached his jaw and chin, Foggy has realized that he’s not sure how to finish this. It’s Mattie’s signature move (at least that’s how he thinks of it), the slow, sensual slide along the lips, and he’s definitely not going there. “And…uh…that’s it.”

“No, you forgot one bit,” she says, as if he’s just forgotten the lyrics to a song. She moves her fingertips to his lips - all four fingers of one hand, so that she can feel his whole mouth under them. It’s not the teasing stroke that she uses when she’s flirting (thank God); it’s almost like she’s reading his skin the way she reads braille. “Can I…” She stops, and swallows, almost nervous. “Would you smile for me?”

Foggy looks at her, trying so desperately to hide that she wants - needs - anything from anyone, and he feels a warmth in his stomach, and it’s impossible not to smile. Her fingertips move minutely as she feels his lips move, the smile growing as he watches her breathing catch a little, until she breaks into a smile of her own, like sunshine.


	4. Taste

February, Sophomore year

Foggy’s heartbeat is like a lifeline through sounds and smells of the party, so Mattie follows it, weaving through drunk frat boys (dodging grabby hands along the way - she really hates frat parties) until she’s sitting on the couch next to him.

“Hey, kitten,” he drawls, and she doesn’t even object to the nickname (she gave up on that about a year ago). “I thought you were with that blonde girl?” he asks, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. Foggy’s very tactile when he’s drunk, and she doesn’t need hyper-senses to smell the beer he’s been drinking, but, then again, everything smells of beer right now. She shakes her head, grinning. He’ll like this story.

“Yeah, no. Not happening.”

“Shit, what happened?”

“She wanted a threesome with her boyfriend.”

Foggy chokes and coughs with a very satisfying sound, and Mattie just cocks her head and raises her eyebrows innocently.

“Why are you not with them, Murdock?!”

“The boyfriend uses Axe.” She wrinkles her nose primly.

“You turned down a threesome because of that?”

“Take it from the Catholic girl: there is a Hell, and it smells like Axe body spray.”

“Is that in the Bible?”

“Yup, somewhere in Revelation, between the seventh seal and the beast from the sea.”

“That so?”

“St. John was remarkably prescient.”

Foggy takes a moment to consider, then concedes. “Fair enough.”

“Hey, Foggy, who’s this?” comes a female voice from Foggy’s other side. Mattie immediately processes all the usual information (size, age, heartbeat, scent, level of intoxication…), but doesn’t recognize the girl. Foggy’s heart speeds up, and Mattie realizes she’s interrupting.

“Aw, thanks Naomi,” he says, pulling his arm from around Mattie to take a cup from the girl’s hand. “This is my roommate Mattie.”

“Hi,” says Mattie, giving a little wave in Naomi’s general direction. “I’m in your spot, aren’t I?”

“Oh, it’s OK,” says Naomi, her heartbeat whispering _lie_ to Mattie.

“Nah, I was going to find somebody to point me towards the keg anyway.” She nudges Foggy encouragingly with her elbow as she hauls herself to her feet. Foggy wanted to come to meet girls, so she’s not getting in his way. “Have fun,” she whispers as she inches past him.

She can smell the keg in the kitchen, so she’s working her way in that direction when she hears, “Hey are you looking for something? Oh, shit, sorry.” She laughs, like she always does (she finds it funny, but not for the same reasons other people do).

“Yeah, I was looking for the keg, actually,” she says.

“Well, you’re in luck,” says the guy. Tall, muscular, and most importantly, not smelling of Axe. “I happen to know exactly where the keg is.”

“So, you gonna help a lady out?”

“Sure thing.” He puts a hand on her back; she stiffens as if she hadn’t felt it coming, but he either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, because he guides her into the kitchen like that. It’s…not the worst way she’s ever been guided. The music is loud, and the people are loud, and she almost misses when he says, “I’m Don.”

“Dan?”

“Don,” he says loudly over the music. “Like Don Draper. From _Mad Men_? The TV show?”

“I don’t really watch TV,” she says. “I like records, though.”

“Oh, yeah, I get that. Oh, hang on, yeah, can I get two of those?” Don is talking to the frat brother manning the keg. “Here,” he says, and she knows he’s holding out a cup full of beer to her, but she just cocks her head. “Oh, uh, I’ve got a beer for you, uh, what was your name again?”

“Mattie,” she says, and holds out her hand a few inches away from the cup. He tries to slot it into her hand, but she manages to take it before he can spill it.

“Maddie. Short for Madison?” He has his hand on her arm now, easing her away from the keg and toward the hall where there are fewer people.

“Matilda.”

“Like the movie!”

“Yeah, like the movie,” she says. Actually, her dad named her for the book, but the movie is based on the book, and it doesn’t matter right now. The air in the hall is a little cooler, and quieter, and she puts her back against the wall next to the kitchen door as she sips her beer. In the living room, Foggy is telling Naomi the story about how they got stuck in the subway over Christmas.

“I bet you’re really smart, like the girl in the movie,” says Dan/Don.

“Ask my professors about that,” Mattie says with a laugh.

“Yeah? What are you taking?”

“Sociology.”

Don, it turns out, is a football player majoring in Business, is not a frat brother (thankfully), and likes cable TV shows.

“So you’ve never seen _The Sopranos_?”

“Well, I haven’t seen much TV for a while,” she says wryly.

“Yeah, but don’t they have, like descriptive audio on the DVDs or something?”

She’s about to answer when she’s hit in the side by…someone. She’s splashed with liquid that’s lukewarm and sticky, while the girl who collided with her slurs “Sorry, sorry,” and tries to wipe the liquid off Mattie’s face. It tastes of cheap rum and artificial sweeteners. Mattie can smell that the girl has had far too many of them, and that she threw up a few minutes ago. There are three guys pulling her away from Mattie, laughing in a way that sends tension up Mattie’s spine, practically carrying the girl down the hall. Mattie hears them go up the stairs at the end of the hall at the same time that Don says, “Wow, she really got you, didn’t she?”

“What?”

“Your shirt is, like, covered in whatever she was drinking.” Don is standing in front of her, and judging from the angle of his head, he’s looking straight down her shirt, which is plastered against her. She wonders if it will stain, but can’t remember what colour shirt she’s wearing. “Uh, do you want me to get you a paper towel or something?”

Mattie can hear the girl stumbling in the hall upstairs, one of the guys with her saying “In here,” the girl muttering “No, no,” and another guy saying “Hey, don’t be like that,” and she can feel something hot and dark uncurling around her heart. She fights down the urge to race upstairs, reminds herself that _blind girls can’t do that_. There’s another way, though.

“No,” says Mattie, but she reaches out to Don’s chest. He’s wearing a sweatshirt, with letters sewn to the front (probably Columbia), and she slides her hand up to his neck and finds a hood. Perfect. “But can I borrow this while I find the restroom? I should probably clean myself up.”

“You gonna bring it back?” says Don, leaning into her space, while upstairs Mattie hears a slurred “Get off me,” and the animal in her chest screams in fury.

“Trade you for my beer?” says Mattie.

“Sure.”

Don is much bigger than her, so the hoodie hangs off her as she slips out the side door of the house. She pauses, but no one is outside in the winter night, and the windows are all closed. She leans her cane against the wall, and hooks her glasses through the wrist strap, listening all the while to find the right window. When she does, it’s by the sound of male laughter that makes her fists clench and her teeth grit, and her shoulders drop back in anticipation. She flips up the hood, and jumps to the second-story window, catching the sill with her fingertips, and pulling herself up so that she’s crouched on the tiny ledge. The window is an old guillotine-style (luckily, the frat hasn’t renovated in years), and while it would be immensely satisfying to smash her way in, she instead slides the window up and grips the sides of the window, flipping in feet-first.

She smashes the lamp on the bedside table first - the overhead light isn’t warm, and she can’t hear the hum of electricity, so she assumes that the lamp is the only light. The first guy, closest to her, gets her boot heel in the nose. The second, the one on top of the girl on the bed, is grabbed by his hair and his arm and thrown onto the floor, and she hears the pop of his shoulder dislocating. The third tries to open the door, but Mattie jumps and kicks it shut, twisting in midair to land a punch on his jaw. She feels the air shift as the second guy tries to rush her, but she sidesteps him and kicks him in the ribs and feels them break. He lands face down on the floor as Mattie grabs the girl off the bed and throws the door open.

“Go downstairs, and tell someone what happened,” she orders the girl, who can barely stand on her own. “Come on, you have to take it from here.” She gives the girl a shove, and closes the door behind her, hoping to hell that she’ll make it downstairs, just as the third guy staggers to his feet. She cuts off the stream of profanity he directs at her with a knee to his gut and an elbow to his head. She turns her head to the first guy, who is huddled in the corner, his broken nose bleeding into his hands.

“I didn’t do anything!” he says as she stalks toward him, his heartbeat betraying the lie.

“You stood there and laughed,” she snarls, grabbing the front of his shirt and shoving him face first into the carpet, pulling his arm up behind him. “If I find out that any girl has been hurt in this house ever again, I’m coming back for you.” The predator inside her claws at her heart, screaming for more, telling her how much damage she can do to him, and that she wouldn’t be wrong. Instead, she slams a fist across the back of his head. knocking him out.

She climbs up onto the window sill, and flips out. She’s supposed to land gracefully on her feet, but she’s never done parkour in heels (or with three beers in her), so she instead goes down on one knee, feeling her tights tear and her skin scrape against the hard ground, but it doesn’t matter, because her blood is rushing hot and thick, and as she stands she stretches the muscles that she hasn’t used in so long, and her body hasn’t felt so _alive_ in years.

She can hear her grandmother’s voice, saying “Be careful of the Murdock boys, they’ve got the devil in them.” Well, she’s her father’s daughter after all.

Her smile is cold and fierce as she takes off Don’s hoodie and retrieves her cane and glasses, and slides back into the house. Her senses feel sharper than usual, the world on fire layering on top of itself with more and more information. She can hear the girl’s heartbeat on the stairs, and someone is asking her in a kind voice if she’s all right, and what happened. Foggy’s heart is beating fast in the living room as there’s a slide of skin against fabric, and Don’s heart picks up as she turns the corner into the hall where she left him.

“Hey, what happened?” He’s finished his beer, and holds hers awkwardly out to her, which she ignores.

“Got lost,” she says, prowling toward him and letting her hips sway, because the devil inside her hasn’t been satisfied yet. “Thanks for the lend.” She holds out his hoodie to him, but when he takes it in his free hand, she uses it to pull him close to her. “It was really nice of you,” she says, letting the devil smile wickedly. She can feel his breath on her face, and smell beer and burgers on his breath, and she slides her hand up to his jaw and kisses him, tasting his story on her tongue.

“I’ve never kissed a blind girl,” he says, and normally that would make her roll her eyes and say something cutting, but right now she doesn’t care enough to say anything, because his tongue is in her mouth, and she’s pulling him sideways so that she’s pressed against the wall, and he’s dropped the hoodie on the floor so he can slide his hand under the hem of her skirt.

“Do you want to get out of here?” he says against her lips.

“Yes.”

On the way to Don’s place, she gets a call from Foggy. 

“Hey, are you still here?”

“No, uh, I left a few minutes ago.”

“Oh, good,” he says. “The cops are here.”

“What?”

“Yeah, not sure what happened, apparently some guys got in a fight? But, just wanted to make sure you were OK.”

“Yeah, Foggy, I’m fine. I’m not going to be home tonight, though.” She flashes a grin in Don’s direction, although she doesn’t know if he grins back.

“Oh, hey, that’s cool. See you tomorrow, and have good sex!”

“Shut up, Foggy,” she says fondly, as he hangs up.

“Everything OK?” says Don.

“Yeah, apparently the cops got called.”

“Shit. Guess we left at the right time, huh?”

“Yeah,” she says, as he puts an arm around her waist. “Perfect timing.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, it's Mattie's POV finally!


	5. Twenty-One

April, Junior year

Foggy had been scandalized when Mattie told him what she wanted to do for her twenty-first birthday. He’d tried to negotiate, cajole, and had even resorted to flat-out bribery to try to convince her to let him take her and Elektra to a bar and get properly, legally drunk, preferably on something ridiculous and fruity that involved paper umbrellas and coconuts, but Mattie had held fast.

She wants him to take her to the Cloisters.

“Elektra’s taking me out for dinner, anyway,” she had said, and these days, if she goes for dinner with Elektra, all she wants to do after is spend the night with Elektra. They’ve been going out for six weeks, and Mattie has spent all of them with a warmth in her gut that she thinks might be love.

“Right,” he’d said. 

Foggy and Elektra…are perfectly polite when they run into each other. Perfectly, icily, deliberately polite. Neither of them has said a word against the other in Mattie’s presence, both have made a point of saying how much they love how much Mattie cares about the other, and Mattie knows she is going to have to do something about this soon, just not today. Besides, Foggy had started dating Rachel just after Mattie had gotten together with Elektra, so she doesn’t feel guilty about leaving him on his own. Except for the part where she flat-out hates Rachel, who is planning on joining the Marines, and took Foggy to a gun range as a date.

But it’s Mattie’s birthday, so she’ll be damned if she’s not going to spend it with the two people she loves most, even if it means negotiating joint custody.

So Foggy takes her up to Fort Tryon Park, and uses the money his parents gave him to pay for lunch at the New Leaf, and insists that they at least share a bottle of champagne. It’s just enough to get her loose and giggly, while Foggy teases her about being a lightweight. At one point he stops laughing, and says quietly, “I miss this.”

“What?”

“You.”

“We literally live together, you see me all the time.”

“Yeah, but since…We haven’t done this in a while, and I kinda miss it, is all I’m saying.”

She slides her hand along the table towards him, and he puts his hand over hers, and she tries not to think that he’s right.

“Miss you too,” she says, and she means it.

The walk to the museum through the park helps clear her head, and she squeezes herself against Foggy as he guides her, telling her about the view of the Hudson. His voice is quiet, appreciative, and the view sounds beautiful. It’s on the tip of her tongue to tell Foggy about all the scents of spring flowers and new growth that surround them, and how much she loves them and looks forward to spring because of them, but then she remembers that to tell him that would mean telling him everything, and she doesn’t know how to do that.

Foggy booked them into a guided touch tour, and the guide turns out to be a lovely woman named Annamarie with a hint of a Georgia accent (Mattie loves accents). Annamarie is delighted when Foggy tells her that it’s Mattie’s birthday, and promises to “make this one extra-special.” She leads them through the collection, pausing to guide Mattie to reach out and feel particular pieces. Mattie particularly likes the stained glass, how the webwork of lead creates a puzzle that she can decipher as Annamarie tells her the image that is created by the way the shapes fit together, but then Annamarie encourages her to brush her fingers over the carved face of a saint, and all Mattie can think is that this is a part of her own heritage, a connection to a history stretching back centuries that she is a part of. She thinks she should cross herself, or whisper a prayer to this saint, but it’s a museum, not a church, and she takes her hand away and lets Annamarie move them along.

When the tour is over, and Annamarie has wished her a happy birthday, she and Foggy linger in the garden, Mattie almost absently sliding her fingertips over the carved columns.

“So, was it what you wanted?” Foggy says.

She nods, tracing a stone curlicue.

“Yeah. I mean, living in New York, there’s not really anything around that’s older than the Revolution,” she says. “I’ve never - it’s amazing, you know, to actually touch something that’s been around for centuries.” 

“You’re a giant nerd, you know that?”

“You might have mentioned it before.”

He hugs her then, and his heartbeat is strong and steady as he whispers “Happy birthday, kitten” into her hair.

Elektra comes over to their apartment in the afternoon, the scent of jasmine floating around her, borne by the trailing scarves she likes to wear. They barricade themselves in the bathroom for well over an hour while Elektra manhandles Mattie’s hair and face with various implements of torture, and Mattie does her best to distract Elektra, until Elektra threatens to tie Mattie to the chair. Her heartbeat says it’s not an idle threat, so Mattie just grins and says “Promise?” She feels Elektra’s body respond to that, heartbeat increasing, breathing growing heavier, and the scent of arousal tingeing the air. Elektra leans over so that her lips are nearly brushing Mattie’s.

“I should have said, ‘I will tie you to that chair _and leave you there_ ,’” she whispers. She puts a hand on Mattie’s shoulder and pushes her back into her seat before Mattie can kiss her, and Mattie groans. “Now, hold still, or you’re going to get a bobby pin in the face.”

Once Elektra deems Mattie presentable, they move into Mattie’s room to change. Elektra’s official birthday present to Mattie is the dress and shoes they’d picked together at Saks last weekend; Mattie had liked the texture of the beading, and the way Elektra’s breath had caught when she had come out of the fitting room. Elektra had said that the dress was by some designer whose name meant nothing to Mattie, and Mattie had balked at the price when Elektra had paid for it, but she’d been far enough away that she’d had to pretend she never heard it.

Mattie hears the fabric of Elektra’s dress slide against her skin as she pulls it on, and the whisper of a zipper closing, and steps up behind Elektra and slides her hands over the other girl’s hips. Elektra’s dress is smooth and soft, and clings to the curves of her body, and Elektra hums pleasantly as Mattie skims her hands over the silk. Mattie in her fancy heels is almost as tall as Elektra is without shoes, so Elektra’s bare shoulder is just under Mattie’s chin, and Mattie presses her lips to Elektra’s skin and lets the smell of jasmine surround her. 

“Don’t you dare undo any of my hard work,” Elektra teases.

“Well,” says Mattie, brushing Elektra’s hair away from her neck and placing a kiss there, too, “you might have to help me with my lipstick again…”

When they emerge from Mattie’s room (hair and makeup immaculate), Foggy’s heartbeat picks up from where he’s sitting on the couch.

“Wow, you two look…” His voice trails off, and his hands wave vaguely in front of him. “I’m waving my hands because I’m out of words.”

Elektra laughs, and Mattie grins. “His gestures were very positive,” says Elektra.

“Yes! This is totally positive feedback. A-plus.”

“Glad you approve,” Mattie says as Elektra nudges her with her coat.

The restaurant where Elektra takes her is on the Upper East Side, and Mattie can smell high-end ingredients in heavenly combinations, as well as expensive perfumes and colognes on the patrons. Sounds are absorbed by plush carpeting and high-quality tablecloths, but Mattie can overhear the kinds of conversations that would have shocked her before Columbia, conversations where money is barely a consideration (“We sent him to live in Italy for a year to study art”). French words are bandied about (“We’ll have the Chablis Vaillons 2002”), and the maitre d’ addresses Elektra as “Miss Natchios” as he leads them into the restaurant. An older woman doused in Chanel No. 5 says something disapproving to her companion about the two young women as they pass her table, but the man’s heartbeat has quickened in attraction, and he tells the woman that it’s perfectly normal nowadays.

“What was this place called again?” Mattie asks as the maitre’d holds her chair out and Elektra guides her into her seat.

“Daniel,” Elektra says, as if it’s supposed to mean something to Mattie. “They just got another Michelin star.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“You will once we start eating.”

Elektra starts reading her the cocktail menu.

“How much is one of those?”

“Five dollars,” lies Elektra, not even bothering to hide it.

“‘Lektra…”

“It’s your birthday, I get to spoil you, so pick a cocktail.”

“Can I ask how much anything is?”

“Five dollars. And don’t even ask about the food, because we’re getting the tasting menu. With wine pairings.”

“Let me guess - twenty bucks for the whole thing?”

“That’s right.”

Mattie orders a cocktail that involves champagne and four other ingredients that she identifies on her tongue as she sips. It’s effervescent and tastes like joy.

By the time the second course is served, Mattie still has no idea what Michelin stars are, but she’s pretty sure they mean that the chef has been blessed by God Himself.

“I think I just had an orgasm from this,” she says, as a scallop melts in her mouth. She’s never had scallops before. Elektra just runs her foot along Mattie’s calf under the table, making a low satisfied sound.

By the end of the seventh course (and the seventh glass of wine, plus the cocktail), Elektra’s fingers are intertwined with hers on the tabletop, and Mattie is seriously considering hauling her to her feet and planting a proper matinee-idol kiss on her lips.

“I love you,” slips out before she realizes that was what she wanted to say. Elektra strokes her thumb over the back of Mattie’s hand, before lifting it to her cheek. Mattie’s thumb traces her lips, and she knows that Elektra is smiling.

“I love you,” Elektra says against her hand.

They kiss in the cab all the way back to Elektra’s townhouse, and Mattie twists Elektra’s silk scarf through her fingers as Elektra’s hand slides under her coat and over her breast.

Once they’re inside, Elektra insists on helping Mattie take off her makeup and undo her hair (Mattie is of the opinion that this can wait until _after_ ) before she unzips Mattie’s dress and gently tugs it over her head. She gently pushes Mattie’s hands away when she tries to reciprocate, and she is still fully clothed when Mattie is naked on her back on top of Elektra’s silk sheets. Her scarf brushes against Mattie’s skin as Elektra straddles her and leans over to kiss her. Mattie sinks her hands into Elektra’s hair and feels the thousands of strands slide against her fingers, before Elektra gently takes each of her wrists and pins them to above her head.

“I told you, I get to spoil you tonight,” she says against Mattie’s ear, and Mattie’s breath hitches at that, and she tries to press up against Elektra’s hands, but Elektra is strong, and Mattie’s not trying very hard anyway. The tiny part of her that she still hears in Stick’s voice reminds her how many different ways she can escape this hold, and that she could have Elektra under her in less than three seconds if she wanted, but she really doesn’t care.

And Elektra has taken her wrists in one hand, and is sliding the scarf from around her neck with the other, wrapping Mattie’s wrists in silk before tying the ends to the headboard. She leans back, lightly trailing her fingertips over Mattie’s breasts, making Mattie pant in anticipation.

“You spend so much time being in control,” Elektra says, low and sultry. “I just want you to let me take care of you.”

Mattie thinks she should probably argue, that she needs to be in control to protect herself, that without it it’s too much, too much, but Elektra is taking off her dress, and crawling up her body so that they are skin to skin, and the world on fire is ablaze with scent and sound and sensation, and she is flayed, her nerves raw and exposed, and it’s frightening and beautiful, and she never wants it to stop.

All she can remember later is flashes of Elektra’s lips on hers, Elektra’s hands on her breasts, Elektra’s mouth between her legs…

In the morning, after Mattie has made Elektra come, moaning and swearing in Greek, Elektra brings up two plates of waffles and ice cream for breakfast, and Mattie doesn’t mind her headache from the wine, because she can feel the warm sunlight through the space between the curtains, and Elektra’s leg pressed against hers, until Elektra nudges her out of her reverie.

“What are you thinking, Mattie?”

“Uh-oh.”

“Shut up. I’m serious.”

“Honestly? I was thinking that I would like to never have to leave this room.” Elektra doesn’t say anything, and Mattie can’t tell if she’s smiling. “What do you think about that, ‘Lektra? We’ve got wifi, ice cream, a bed. Let’s just stay here.”

There’s a pause, before Elektra leans over and puts her hand on Mattie’s face. “That would be nice,” she says, and her kiss tastes of waffles and vanilla.

Mattie doesn’t make it home until the next morning. When she does, Foggy just laughs and says “That’s one hell of a walk of shame, buddy,” and Mattie smiles brightly as she gives him the finger.

Two weeks later, Elektra’s father is gunned down in Athens. Elektra is on a plane within hours, with only a phone call to Mattie to tell her what happened. Mattie calls her two days later to ask if she’s OK, and all Elektra will say is, “It’s not good, Mattie, and I’m going to have to stay here for a while.”

Mattie tries calling again the day of the funeral, but only gets voicemail. You shouldn’t be surprised, she thinks, she’s probably busy with the funeral, and maybe you got the time difference wrong, anyway. She dutifully takes notes in the Spanish classes they share, and emails them to Elektra’s Columbia account. The third time she calls, the number has been disconnected. A week after the funeral, an email she sends to Elektra’s Gmail account bounces back.

Foggy asks her how Elektra’s doing, and she tells him she honestly has no idea, so Foggy tries to message Elektra on Facebook, but her profile is gone. When Mattie curls up in bed at night, her head is filled with a litany of “not again, not again, please don’t let this happen again,” that she tries to silence, but it’s louder than any sound her ears can hear.

Mattie doesn’t cry. Instead, her life becomes mechanical, a set of routines that she has to fulfill in order to make it to the next day. Eating becomes optional, she’s not hungry a lot of the time, but studying for finals and training at Fogwell’s give her structure, even if she barely cares about anything she’s studying, and she keeps to the barest minimum of training. She declines to go out when Foggy invites her, and listens to records on the turntable that was Foggy’s birthday present to her. Foggy brings Rachel over a few times, but Rachel doesn’t like Mattie as much as Mattie doesn’t like her, and Mattie ends up hiding in her room, throwing herself into studying.

The final straw comes when she tries to email Elektra’s Columbia account about finals, and it bounces back as deactivated. She asks the professor about it after class, and she tells Mattie that Elektra has withdrawn from Columbia. There’s a question in the professor’s voice, an implication of “shouldn’t you have known that?” that Mattie ignores in favour of the pounding of “she’s gone, she left you, just like everyone else” in her head.

When Mattie doesn’t come out of her room all weekend, Foggy knocks on her door.

“Yeah?” she says weakly.

“Can I come in?”

“Sure.”

She hears Foggy flick on the light, and sit down in her desk chair facing her.

“How are you doing, buddy?”

“Fine,” she says. Even Foggy can tell she’s lying.

“You want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“OK.” Foggy takes a breath, the way he does when he wants to say something. “Did you hear from Elektra?” he says neutrally.

“She’s withdrawn.”

“What?”

“From Columbia. Professor Alonso told me.”

“She didn’t tell you?” “She” being Elektra, Mattie assumes.

“No. She’s just…gone.”

“When’d you find out?”

“Friday.”

Foggy nods. “I just nodded.” He leans over and rubs his hand over her shoulder. “Dude, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

And he’s climbing onto the bed, wrapping his arms around her, and she sinks her fingers into his shirt over his heart, and feels it beat against her palm, the one constant she’s had in her life for the past three years. “He’ll leave you too,” whispers the voice in her head, “They always do.” She tightens her grip on his shirt, and he squeezes her.

After he’s held her for a while, she hears him take a little sniff of her hair before he says, “OK, I know life sucks right now, but you really need to take a shower and eat something.”

“Don’t really feel like it.”

“I know, but this is kind of not optional at this point.” She groans a little, so he keeps going. “So I’m going to go get some supplies, and you’re going to take a shower, and I’ll order some pizza when I get back, OK?” He disentangles himself from her before finishing, “and if you haven’t showered by the time I get back, I’m throwing you in there in your PJs.”

She finds the motivation to get up and shower about two minutes before Foggy comes back to the apartment, which means that the pizza arrives just as she’s coming out to the living room with wet hair and wrapped in the robe Foggy’s parents gave her for Christmas a few years back.

“Hey, feel a bit better?”

“A bit,” she concedes. “What’d you get?” As if she couldn’t tell from the smell.

“Meat lovers. And Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie, and a bottle of Wild Fowl.”

“OK?”

“Yeah, we’re going to put on _Finding Nemo_ , and eat pizza and ice cream, and get shitfaced,” Foggy says in a tone that brooks no objections. He doesn’t say “and not talk about Elektra,” but it’s heavily implied. 

“That sounds great,” says Mattie.

Just after Marlin and Dory escape from the sharks, Foggy gets a text. Mattie hears his heart speed up as he returns it. Almost immediately, his phone rings.

“Hold on,” he says, pausing the movie as he presses his phone to pick up the call. “Hey babe…” It’s Rachel on the other end, and he takes the phone into his room. Mattie tries not to eavesdrop, scooping at the tub of ice cream instead. Of course Foggy got her favorite flavour, she thinks. She overhears Foggy saying, “she’s just having a really hard time,” and feels a flash of anger that Foggy is pitying her. That’s all this is. He’d rather be with Rachel, who may be a bitch, but she’s not a mess who needs Foggy to tell her when to take a shower.

Foggy comes back with his heart pounding, and Mattie turns to face him. “That Rachel?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“Look, if you want to go hang out with her, I’m OK here.”

“What? No, that’s not - I just broke up with her.”

“Oh.” Mattie slides her hand along the table to the bottle of Wild Fowl, and holds it out to Foggy. “Shit, I’m sorry.”

“Nah, we were never really serious,” says Foggy, taking the bottle and pouring himself a glass. It’s not a lie. Foggy sits down on the couch next to her, and puts his arm around her. “Guess it’s just you and me, then.”

“Yeah. Must suck for you.” She leans her head on his shoulder, taking a bit of ice cream.

“Nowhere else I’d rather be,” says Foggy, and his heart says it’s true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "I would like to never have to leave this room" exchange is from Daredevil Vol. 2 #37 by Brian Michael Bendis.


	6. York v. Nelson

November, 1L

Foggy is so blindsided, he barely registers what Professor York is saying. Phrases like “disciplinary meeting,” “serious consequences” and “possibility of expulsion” break through, but all Foggy can really hear is the blood pounding in his ears.

He’s not sure how he gets back to Lionsgate. He vaguely thinks he should call Marci, ask her what he should do, but he can’t bear the thought of admitting what he was just accused of. Not to Marci, who he only barely convinced to go out with him, and who always looks like she disapproves of all his life choices.

He makes another bad life choice, and pours himself a glass of whiskey at 4 in the afternoon, because he can’t face his life collapsing around him when he’s sober. Mattie finds him on the couch an hour later, drunk enough that he doesn’t notice she suddenly has the ability to identify that he’s been drinking as soon as she enters the room, and to pluck the glass from his hand as it waves around.

“They’re going to expel me!” he almost yells in her face. “York says I plagiarized my paper!” He slumps back on the couch, as he imagines his parents’ disappointment, and how smug Rosalind is going to be that he lived down to her expectations. “What am I going to tell my dad?” At least his mom will say he can always be a butcher.

“I don’t know, everything -” she starts to say, but he rides right over her.

“Mattie, it’s not fair! I would never cheat, ever!”

Mattie cocks her head, as if she’s listening to something in the distance.

“I believe you,” she says. Her hands are on his shoulders, and he leans his forehead forward to touch hers. “But they can’t expel you point blank.”

“There’s a disciplinary meeting on Friday with the Dean of Students, but it’s that tenured old bastard’s word against mine, so case closed.”

“OK, let me go talk to York before that. He’ll listen to me.”

It’s not actually a terrible plan. York likes Mattie almost as much as he hates Foggy, openly preferring the bright, pretty blind girl to Rosalind Sharpe’s chubby long-haired son. Mattie has said that she thinks York sees himself in her, recognizing his own struggle with disability after his stroke. Foggy hugs her.

“It’s going to be OK,” she says against his ear.

When she comes back from seeing York the next day, her jaw is clenched, her hand is wrapped around her cane in a fist, and she’s radiating a cold fury that he’s only seen once or twice before in the past four years. She grits out the story of how York had claimed Foggy had stolen a years-old paper from his office, and how she’d _known_ he was lying, and said so to his face. And how York had threatened to have her expelled if she accused him again. The last part is what turns Foggy’s spine to ice.

“Whoa, no,” he says.

“Foggy, I’m not going to -“

“Yes, you are. You need to back off and let me handle this.”

“I’m not letting you deal with this on your own!”

“And I’m not letting you get expelled because of me!” He’s breathing hard, and she looks like she wants to throw something. “Look, he’ll get over his tantrum. Just…let it go, OK?” He has her by the arms now, but she’s a coiled weapon under his hands. “You worked really hard to get where you are now. You poke the bear again on my behalf, that asshole’ll make it all for nothing. Let it go. It’s not your fight.”

She turns her face up to his, and he can see his reflection in her glasses. “Fuck that,” says Mattie, the good Catholic girl who _never_ swears. “We do this together.”

Foggy could kiss her right now.

“OK,” she says, after they’ve hugged it out. She’s pacing the living room, that dangerous energy running through her. “Disciplinary meeting’s on Friday. What time?”

“Eleven.”

“That gives us a day and a half to put together a defence.”

“This isn’t a mock trial, Mattie.”

“No, this is real, and we’re going to win. Let’s start with an alibi. We’ll need to account for your whereabouts for the week between when York says you were in his office to when the papers were due.”

“Account for my whole week? Like, how?”

“York claims you went to him last Monday -“

“Another lie.”

“So account for _that_ time. Details are your specialty, Foggy. Where were you Monday? Between 3:30 and 4:15pm.”

“Home staring at my clock and calendar? How do I know?”

“OK, then we need to ask your friends, Marci, check the sign-in sheets at the library, at the gym. We get that for the week, then we can go into the meeting with about ninety percent of a plan. Let’s go.”

They’re out the door, Mattie’s hand in his elbow, and Foggy’s fairly certain she’s dragging him along, rather than letting him guide her. Foggy’s reminded of something their Civil Procedure professor had said: “Lawyering isn’t just about book knowledge. It’s about legwork.”

First stop for Foggy is Marci, who he texts to meet him for lunch while Mattie works her charms on York’s assistants.

“He’s saying what?” Marci says, a forkful of salad halfway to her mouth.

“That I stole a paper from his office and copied it,” Foggy repeats.

“That’s completely ridiculous.”

“I know!”

“You should go to the Dean.”

“I have a disciplinary meeting on Friday. But we need proof, otherwise it’s York’s word against mine.”

“And what exactly do you need to prove? You have your research notes, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but he’ll just say I forged them after the fact. What we need to do is prove that I couldn’t have stolen the paper and copied it.”

Marci nods, her lips pressed together.

“And how are you going to do that?”

“I need you to confirm all the times we were together that week.”

And that gets him an eyebrow and a smirk.

“You’re going to tell York - and the Dean - about every time we were together?”

“I’m not planning on going into detail.”

“Well, maybe you should. Dean Goldenberg might get off on it even if York doesn’t.”

“Marci…”

“I’m joking, Foggy. Now what dates are we talking about?”

He passes her his notebook, with the dates in question listed, with notes next to each marking when he’d been in Mattie’s company. Marci pulls out a pen and her phone, and checks what her schedule had said for those days, marking down each one methodically.

“Oh, I remember this one - Mattie was hiding in the library to finish her paper, so I came over.” She jots it down, and puts next to it in parentheses “cunnilingus.”

“Marci -“

“What? It’s not like Mattie’s going to read it,” she says in that voice which sounds oh so reasonable. “And it sounds like you need reminding of what was happening for each of these times.”

Instead of answering, he blushes.

She keeps putting down notes (most of them not R-rated), until at least half of Foggy’s time is accounted for. He looks at the sketched-out schedule, and it actually looks pretty good - between Marci and Mattie, the windows when he could have stolen the paper are few and far between.

“You’re the best, Marci.”

“Damn right I am. So what’s your next step?”

“Well, I’ve got to check the copy centre and have them confirm that nothing was charged to my copy card in that week. And I’ve got to head up to the library to check my sign-in times, and see if I can’t fill in any of these windows.”

“Give me your copy card.”

“What?”

“I’ll go to the copy centre, you go to the library.” And for a moment, the tough mask drops, and her eyes are big and blue and soft. “I’m not letting you get kicked out because York’s got a bug up his ass about your biomom.”

And Foggy kisses her, right there, and she lets him, even though she doesn’t like PDAs.

“OK, OK, don’t get too excited until we take this asshole down,” she says.

The three of them spend the afternoon, the evening and all of Thursday sprinting across campus multiple times. By Thursday night, Foggy is hunched over his laptop compiling his alibi on a spreadsheet while Mattie and Marci are sprawled on the couch. 

“You know,” Foggy says, stretching his back, “my mom wanted me to be a butcher.”

“We know, Foggy,” says Mattie.

“And I said, ‘No, Mom, I want to be a lawyer.’”

“And you will be.”

“If we pull this off.”

“We will.”

Foggy wishes he had her conviction.

“And if you don’t,” Marci says brightly, “you can always say that York grabbed Mattie’s ass when she was in his office.” For a moment, Foggy thinks she’s serious, then he sees that wily grin, and it’s not that funny, but they’re all laughing. It feels good.

“Let’s not stoop to his level, babe,” Foggy says.

On Friday morning, the coffee in Foggy’s stomach feels like acid as he and Mattie wait outside the Dean of Students’ office. They’re both in their job interview suits, and at one point Mattie turns to him and says quietly, “Does my hair look OK?” She’s been running her hands through her hair nervously, so he helps her smooth it down, thinking how long it’s gotten since he first met her.

York shows up at 11:05 and sweeps into the Dean’s office without acknowledging either of them. Foggy helps Mattie up and guides her into the office.

“Miss Murdock, may I ask what you think you’re doing here?” says York icily.

“Providing representation,” she says evenly.

“This is not a trial, this is a private meeting -“

“I asked her to be here,” interrupts Foggy. He turns to the Dean, who is sitting behind her desk looking vaguely amused. “If that’s all right?” They have a contingency plan in case Mattie gets kicked out, but Foggy isn’t fond of it. The Dean looks them both over, then shrugs.

“Always a danger, with law students. All right, Mr Nelson, if you insist. Miss…?”

“Murdock. Matilda Murdock,” says Mattie, offering her hand a few inches to the left of the Dean, who takes it.

“Take a seat, Miss Murdock.”

Foggy drags in a chair from the hall for himself after he seats Mattie in the one opposite the Dean’s desk. The Dean waits for him to close the door and sit before pulling out two papers, one of which Foggy recognizes as his own, and placing them on her desk. Both papers have handwritten notes on the covers, and sticky notes poking out from the edges of the pages.

“Mr Nelson, Professor York has made the very serious allegation that you plagiarized several passages from this paper by Marianne Kaplan from 1999 for your Contracts paper. I have reviewed both papers, and I am forced to agree that the passages are identical.”

“Excuse me,” interrupts Mattie, “but how does Professor York allege that Franklin acquired Marianne Kaplan’s paper?”

The Dean pauses, and looks at York.

“Mr Nelson clearly noticed it when he came crawling into my office begging for an extension,” York says, and Foggy starts to get hot under the collar at the lie, “then, in a panic, later ‘borrowed’ it from my office.”

“Sir,” says Mattie, “if Franklin stole the original as you claimed, how is it that you still have it?”

“Obviously he made a copy and then returned it.”

“Between the meeting you claimed happened last Monday and the paper’s due date, his copy card has not been used at any university copier.” The look on Mattie’s face is merciless and cold.

“We don’t know where he copied it, Miss Murdock.”

“I will allow that other copy machines exist.”

“How gracious of you.”

“But when would Franklin have burgled your office? Campus security reports no sign of forced entry.”

Foggy is watching the Dean’s face instead of York and Mattie now, and it’s carefully blank, her sharp eyes bouncing back and forth as if she’s watching a tennis match.

“Many people stop in every day,” says York. “My assistants use it. Perhaps one of them left it briefly unattended. Ask them when the door was open.”

“Ah,” says Mattie. “That’s just it, sir. We did.”

That’s Foggy’s cue, and he pulls the folder from his bag, opening it to the spreadsheet he’d prepared, and offering it to the Dean, who takes it with a raised eyebrow.

“We referenced all the times that door was unlocked against every one of my whereabouts,” says Foggy.

“Witnesses can account for him at all overlapping times,” finishes Mattie. “He had no opportunity to enter Professor York’s office, not once, in the timeframe you yourself have specified.” She addresses the last bit to York, practically spitting it in his face. “The ‘evidence’ was in your possession that entire time, sir. In fact,” she turns back to the Dean, “I submit that Professor York plagiarized Franklin’s paper to create the Kaplan one, then pre-dated it against him to frame him for cheating.”

Mattie, Foggy thinks, is fucking terrifying when she’s angry.

“Miss Murdock,” says the Dean, “I would appreciate it if you refrained from making accusations against Professor York.”

“And accusing me of lowering myself to forgery is absurd,” says York. “Your accusation assumes there is only one copy of the paper in existence. But certainly the original author had a copy, and today’s internet is shamefully full of recirculated term papers for illicit purchase. Mr Nelson could have obtained it anywhere.”

Mattie looks like she’s been slapped, and Foggy’s heart sinks as he realizes that they didn’t think of this attack. They’d been too busy focussing on the accusation of theft. His eye drifts to the two papers side by side as York turns to the Dean and tells her he will be making a complaint against Mattie and recommends her expulsion as well for improper behavior. Which is when Foggy sees it.

“No.”

Two pairs of eyes and one pair of sunglasses turn to him as he picks up the papers.

“Professor,” he says, “ten years ago, you suffered a stroke that paralyzed your right arm, correct?”

“Is this relevant, Mr Nelson?” asks the Dean.

“Yes,” says Foggy. “Professor York was right-handed before the stroke, right? We’ve all heard how you had to teach yourself to do everything left-handed.”

“I don’t see -“ starts York.

“Then how come the handwritten notes on this ostensibly twelve-year-old paper match your current handwriting exactly?”

He holds out the two papers to York, who just looks at them.

“Dean Goldenberg?” Mattie says.

“May I see those, Mr Nelson?” The Dean takes the papers from Foggy, and sets them down on her desk. The silence stretches out as she puts on her glasses and examines the papers, flipping through the pages. Foggy feels the back of Mattie’s hand brush against his, and he squeezes her hand.

“Leopold?” says the Dean. “Is there anything you’d like to add?”

“Allison…”

“Because it seems to me that there has been a very grave misunderstanding.” She takes off her glasses, and folds her hands on her desk, looking Foggy in the eye. “Mr Nelson, I believe we owe you an apology for your trouble. Please rest assured that your place at Columbia is quite secure, and I’m very curious to see what you and Miss Murdock can accomplish here.”

She leans back, and Foggy knows they’ve been dismissed. He stammers out a thanks to the Dean, and has Mattie on her feet and out the door in seconds. They practically sprint down the hall, and are in the stairwell when Mattie pulls him to a stop.

“Wait, is that it? A ‘misunderstanding’?” she says.

“Are you kidding? We did it, buddy!”

“But it’s just going to get swept under the rug -“

“He’s tenured, what can they do to him?” Foggy has enough experience following Rosalind’s career at Harvard that he has no illusions that York will face any consequences. 

“Foggy, I’m so sorry -“

“Why? You nailed him to the wall.”

“I screwed up - I didn’t think he’d change his story - I should have pulled out my phone and googled the paper -“

“Hey, I didn’t think of it either, but it’s fine, we got what we wanted.” He grabs Mattie in a bear hug. “And you were awesome in there.”

“So were you,” she says, patting him in the centre of his chest, over his hammering heart. Her smile is brilliant, and his stomach tightens, and he’s pressing his lips to hers. It’s chaste, like the New Year’s kisses they’ve shared over the past few years, and for a brief, insane second, Foggy thinks he can have more, but then she pulls away. There’s a look on her face that he can’t quite read, then she smiles and kisses his cheek, wrapping her arms around his neck, and the moment is gone before he knew it was there.

“I’m not letting you go that easily,” she whispers in his ear, and he squeezes her tightly. After a long moment, she finally breaks the hug, and says, “We should celebrate. You should text Marci.”

Right. Marci.

“She has class right now.” He checks his phone, and it’s only 11:30. “I’ll text her to meet us when she’s done. Go get lunch?”

“Lunch sounds great.” And she slips her hand into the crook of his arm like she has a thousand times, and they head out together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is based on (and some dialogue taken from) Daredevil vol. 3 #12 by Mark Waid.


	7. The Incident

May, 1L

It’s literally the last day of classes before finals, and Mattie is buried under a pile of books in the library. Since half the books she needs are on Course Reserve, she’s dragged her laptop down with her, and is concentrating on scanning the pages of the books into her OCR, so she’s not sure when the murmurs start. She’s getting more and more pissed off at how loud the library has gotten when her phone starts chirping Foggy’s name (they’re supposed to turn off their phones, but she’s exempt thanks to the Office of Disability Services).

“Where are you?” Foggy demands.

“Library. What’s up?”

“Are you kidding? Hasn’t somebody told you?” Foggy sounds scared, she thinks. She’s never heard him sound scared before.

“Told me what?”

“Dude, there’s a giant hole in the sky over Midtown, and I’m pretty sure someone said something about an alien invasion.”

“What?” 

“Stay there, I’m coming up.”

Now that her headphones are out, she can hear the activity around her. Library etiquette has disappeared, everyone is on their phones checking the news, heart rates skyrocketing, and the smell of fear starting to permeate the library. She catches bits of news being passed around: “It’s right over Grand Central.” “Check Tony Stark’s Twitter.” “Is it the Hulk again?” “Did they say aliens?”

Foggy finds her, and drops into the chair next to her as she finds BBC Radio’s live news stream on her laptop.

“…can confirm that Iron Man is on the scene, and is fighting what appears to be an extraterrestrial army descending from what can only be described as a hole in the sky. The damage is already devastating, as cars and buildings are blown apart by the alien weapons…”

Foggy’s hand is on hers, gripping tightly, and his heart is racing. Mattie remembers the summer before college, when she’d listened to similar reports of monsters fighting in Harlem. At least they’re seventy blocks away up here, unlike…

“If it’s over Stark Tower, that’s -,”

“- really close to Hell’s Kitchen. Shit!” Foggy digs his phone out of his pocket, and dials. Mattie can hear the phone ringing on the other end, but no one is picking up. “Mom’s not picking up.”

“I’ll try your dad’s phone, you keep trying your mom,” Mattie says, pulling her phone out of her bag. She tells it to call Edward, and listens to it ring. She leaves a message when it goes to voicemail.

“…that a man seemingly flying under his own power has been sighted in the vicinity of Stark Tower, as well as a military aircraft. At this time, it is unknown what affiliation the individual or the aircraft may have, but they were reported to be supporting Iron Man against the invaders before it was shot down in front of Grand Central Station…” The BBC reporter’s voice is shaky, and Mattie wonders where she might be, and hopes that she’s safe from whatever is happening.

Neither Edward nor Anna Nelson are picking up their phones, but Foggy’s phone goes off as soon as he hangs up from his third try.

“Candace?” Foggy’s sister is finishing her freshman year at Berkeley, so she’s well away from New York.

“Foggy, oh, my God, what is happening over there?!” Mattie doesn’t bother to tune out Candace’s voice.

“God, I don’t know, they’re saying aliens on the news.”

“Have you heard from Mom and Dad?”

“I’ve been trying them, but I can’t get through.”

“Me too. Are you OK?”

“Yeah, we’re up at school, we’re nowhere near it.”

Mattie’s attention is grabbed by the news when she hears the words “Captain America.”

“…Hulk, as well as two other unidentified individuals, are confirmed to be present at the scene, and active against the aliens. To repeat, the confirmed combatants are now Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, and three as yet unidentified individuals…”

“Candace, I gotta keep trying Mom and Dad. I’ll call you when I hear from them.” Foggy hangs up, and immediately dials again. “What was that about Captain America?” he says as the phone rings.

“He’s out there with Iron Man and the Hulk,” Mattie says. And she wonders, is this the war Stick talked about? She can hear his voice saying “you’re a warrior,” and she knows she should be out there too. But what is she supposed to do, catch the subway down to Grand Central? Parkour down seventy blocks of Manhattan skyscrapers?

“Jesus,” says Foggy. “Is Hulk on our side or their side?”

“Ours, it sounds like.” Mattie hangs up, and tells her phone to dial Edward’s number again. It just rings.

“…authorities are evacuating the area, which comprises most of Midtown Manhattan…”

On the word “evacuating,” both Mattie and Foggy freeze. Mattie hangs up the phone as she hears Edward’s voicemail message for the third time.

“They’re probably in the middle of evacuating,” she says. “Or they could be down in the subway.”

“Or the cell phone towers might have been knocked out,” Foggy says. “I know.”

Neither of them say the other possibility.

“Did they say they’re evacuating?” comes a voice from behind them - her ex Cathal, she realizes.

“They’re evacuating Midtown,” she says. “Below 50th, it sounds like.”

“Think we’re safe up here?” He stands behind her, his hands on the back of her chair.

“I don’t know.” The aliens can fly, she thinks. A ground perimeter won’t stop them. 

Words like “devastation,” “casualties,” and “death toll” are starting to be used by the reporter.

“Was it like this the last time?” asks Cathal. “With the Hulk?”

“No,” says Mattie. “This much, much worse.”

“Deadly,” says Cathal ironically, his Dublin accent getting thicker as the situation gets grimmer.

And Mattie remembers when the Hulk had been in Harlem when she was eighteen, but she hadn’t been afraid, not then, because Harlem was so far away for a kid in Hell’s Kitchen. But even though the physical distance is pretty much the same, Stark Tower and Midtown seem so much closer to where she is now. “And you have so much more to lose,” says the voice in her head.

“Mattie,” says Foggy, “what do we do if we need to leave?”

“Then I’ll protect you and keep you safe,” Mattie wants to say, but instead, she says, “Then we go. But only if we have to.”

Foggy’s phone beeps then.

“Is that your mom?”

“No, it’s Marci. She’s checking where we are.” Foggy’s heart betrays the little lie as he texts her back.

“…reports that one of the alien leviathans just crashed into Grand Central Station, it appears that the Hulk was aboard it at the time…”

Marci arrives ten minutes later, and throws herself into the chair next to Foggy, who puts an arm around her and pulls her tight against him.

“I just ran here from Warren - any updates?” she gasps, out of breath. Mattie had heard her running up all three flights of stairs to the library.

“It sounds like there’s a whole team out there with Captain America,” says Foggy.

“But it is aliens? That’s what Twitter was saying.”

“That’s what they’re saying,” says Mattie, gesturing vaguely at her laptop.

“Oh, God…” Mattie can tell that Marci has leaned forward to put her elbows on the table. Her heart is pounding, but everyone’s is right now. Cathal’s hand is warm on Mattie’s shoulder, and she reaches up and grips it. He slides into the chair next to her, and doesn’t let go.

They spend the next half hour like that, Marci and Foggy huddled together, and Cathal holding Mattie’s hand, while inside, Mattie is screaming because she’s frightened and helpless, and those are two things she swore she’d never be again. They listen to the reports, confusing, sometimes inconsistent, of the battle. Iron Man is dead. Civilian casualty estimates are in the thousands. The aliens are falling out of the sky. Iron Man is not dead.

And then it’s over.

“We can confirm that the hole in the sky over Stark Tower has closed, and the alien attackers appear to have collapsed en masse…”

As one, the room starts breathing again.

While the library comes back to life, Mattie reaches over to Foggy and brushes her hand against his shoulder.

“Any word?”

Foggy pulls his phone towards him on the table.

“No.”

“They’ll be OK,” she says. Please let them be, they have to be, she prays.

“I need air,” Marci declares suddenly, and she does sound like she might be starting a panic attack, so Foggy takes her downstairs, promising to call Mattie as soon as he hears from his parents.

“How are you holding up, Mattie?” asks Cathal when they’re gone. 

“Worried,” she says honestly.

“About Foggy’s parents?”

She nods. “They’re like family to me,” she says, which is a lie. They _are_ family, they’re her only family, and the horrible memory of an alley and her father’s blood on her hands is suddenly all around her.

She’s aware of Cathal’s hand on her back, rubbing gentle circles as she breathes deep and reminds herself that she’s not smelling blood right now, and forces herself to listen to Stick’s voice in her head, telling her that her mind controls her body. She has no idea what Cathal is saying when she straightens up.

“I think Marci had the right idea,” she says shakily, and she starts to collect the debris of her belongings.

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“No, I’m fine.” It’s not true, they both know it, but Cathal at least knows when to back off.

She flees across the bridge from JGH into campus, and she doesn’t realize where she is headed until she is at the doors of St. Paul’s Chapel. It’s quiet inside, only a few people in the whole building. She checks her watch (a graduation gift from Edward and Anna, and that thought sends another wave of worry through her), and Mass should be finishing now, but she’d be surprised if anyone bothered today. The doors are open, though, and there’s no-one in the chapel itself, so she slips in and sits in one of the chairs that was set out for Mass, resting her forearms on the back of the chair in front of her and clasping her hands together.

Her first prayer is for Edward and Anna. For their safety.

Her second prayer is for the lives lost. That they find peace.

Her third prayer is for her city. That it will heal.

Her fourth prayer is one of thanks. For her own safety, and for Foggy’s.

Her fifth prayer is for forgiveness. For what she failed to do. 

“You can’t punch a hole in the sky,” whispers the voice in her head, but she should have _tried_ , she should have done _something_.

Her body is itching under her skin, and she wishes she could go to Fogwell’s, but it’s inside the perimeter, and she can’t take the edge off with some parkour, because up in Morningside Heights, she’s limited to whatever city block she starts in, unless she wants to explain how she can climb up and down the sides of buildings when she needs to cross the street.

Her phone rings with Foggy’s name, deafening in the quiet of the chapel.

“Hey, any news?” she says.

“Yeah, just got off the phone with my dad,” says Foggy. “They’re OK,” and Mattie feels some of the tension drain away, “Mom broke her ankle when they were getting out of the Kitchen, so they’re stuck in the hospital until someone can see them. Which might be a while.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet.”

“But, uh, they don’t know when they’re lifting the cordon around Midtown, so when they do get out, they might not be able to go home. So I said they could come up here and stay with us, if that’s all right with you?”

“Yeah, of course, Foggy.”

“Awesome, thanks, buddy. Look, they’ve cancelled classes, so Marci and I are heading back to her place, but I’ll give you a call when they get out of hospital, and I’ll be there when they show up.”

“Sure, yeah. Take care of Marci.”

“Thanks.”

As she hangs up, she leans her forehead on the arm still resting on the chair in front of her, and whispers “Thank you” to whoever is listening.

Edward and Anna don’t get out of the hospital until late in the evening. Foggy comes back to their apartment in Lionsgate long enough to install his parents in his room, then decides to go back to Marci’s so he can sleep in a real bed instead of on their wonderfully dilapidated couch. Anna is on painkillers, so she falls asleep immediately, while Edward stays up long enough to check the updates about the cordon before turning in himself. Mattie’s feeling restless, and considers climbing to the roof and taking a run around the block when her phone goes off.

“Cath-al. Cath-al.” Her phone never did learn how to pronounce Cathal’s name.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Well, it’s been a fuck of a day,” he starts, and she has to laugh at that, “and I was considering getting drunk alone, but then I was wondering if you’d fancy a drink right now?”

“Yeah, I’d love one.”

“Grand. Come on down.”

Cathal lives two floors below her and Foggy; they’d met when she and Foggy had moved into the building at the beginning of the year. She brushes her fingers over the metal numbers on the door before she knocks, but, really, she’d know which apartment was his by the heartbeat beyond the door.

“Hiya,” he says as he opens the door. 

“Hey.”

“C’mon in.” His hand is on her shoulder, and he’s guiding her in. He’s got a studio unit, and he’s finishing his final year of law school, so the place is a disaster, and her cane bumps into various pieces of academic detritus on the floor.

“Sorry about the mess,” he says, clearing a path for her to his kitchen table, which is covered in books. He gently puts her hand on the back of a chair, and she sits. “What can I get you? I’ve got beer and whiskey.”

“Whiskey sounds great.”

“Yeah, I thought so too.” He rummages through a cabinet, and pulls out a bottle and two glasses. “Did you hear from Foggy’s parents, by the way?”

“Yeah, they’re fine. They’re actually upstairs at our place right now. Anna broke her ankle, but other than that…” She shrugs.

“Ah, that’s good. I’m glad. Do you take ice?”

“No, I like it neat.”

“Right. Should have remembered. You don’t like anything watered down.”

She doesn’t mention that she can taste every impurity in the tap water that ice cubes are made from. Instead, she says, “Never saw the point.”

“I can see that.” He puts down the glasses and pours whiskey into both. “This is Teeling’s White Burgundy whiskey. My brother gave it to me for Christmas last year, and I was saving it for a special occasion.” He pushes a glass toward her so that it touches the tip of her finger, and she picks it up, breathing in the rich, fruity scent. “I’m thinking surviving an alien invasion counts as one.”

“I’d say so.”

He clinks his glass against hers. “ _Slainte_ ,” he says, and she sips, savoring the flavor. She can taste the oak of the cask, and the wine that soaked into it before it was used for whiskey. The alcohol feels warm on the way down, smooth as silk, although it reminds her briefly of the harsh taste of cheap Scotch and a needle pulling through flesh.

“That’s really good,” she says, shaking away the memory.

“Yeah,” he says, holding up his glass as if he's contemplating it. “Makes you glad to be alive.”

“Thought about that a lot today?”

“Haven’t you?”

She takes another sip, considering the question. “Thought a lot about mortality.” And guilt and responsibility, but she doesn’t say that.

“Yeah. And about the things you’d miss.” She knows he’s looking at her now, can feel his body temperature rising, although whether it’s in embarrassment or attraction, she’s not sure. Their breakup hadn’t been bad; they were just both too busy to be in a real relationship, but it had been nice while it lasted.

And, God, his accent still drives her wild.

“Like what?” She uncrosses her legs, leaning forward so that her knee is closer to his.

“Good whiskey?”

“Cheers to that,” she says, taking a sip.

“Good sex.”

She smiles over her glass as his hand slides over her knee. “Cheers to that, too.” She drains the glass and puts it down deliberately at the same time that he puts his down. The hand on her knee slides up her thigh as his other hand touches her cheek, and then they’re kissing.

They break apart for a moment so Mattie can take off her glasses, and then she climbs onto his lap, planting her mouth on his. He makes a little moaning noise in his throat, and she thinks that she’s missed the noises he makes.

After a few moments, they stop kissing, their foreheads pressed together, both breathing heavily. Her hands are on his face, and she can feel his hungry expression under her fingers. His hands climb up her ass to the hem of her t-shirt, and then he’s pulling it off her, burying his face in her cleavage once it’s gone. She can feel the tiny pinpricks of his stubble against her breasts as he lets out a satisfied hum, and she wants to hear more.

She puts her hands on his shoulders and pushes him away from her breasts, running a thumb along the soft skin of his throat, feeling his pulse. She rolls her hips, grinding against him, which elicits a groan. She’s keeping track of each different sound. He whispers her name as she unbuttons his shirt, his hands grab her ass again, and then she pushes the shirt from his shoulders and runs her hands over his chest. He’s thin and wiry, his skin is soft against hers, and his heart is fluttering in his chest. He inhales sharply when she brushes her thumb against his nipple, his hands gripping her thighs, and then she slides one hand down between them, into the waistband of his jeans, and he’s whispering “yes,” and she should make a joke about James Joyce, but her mouth is too busy making its way down his throat.

She pulls herself off his lap, sinking to her knees between his legs, her lips pressing a trail down his chest. She can feel his heart, his breath, smell his arousal (and hers) surrounding her, and it’s more intoxicating than the whiskey. When her mouth reaches his navel, she strokes her hand over his crotch, feeling his hardness through the fabric, and he groans heavily, her name drawn out into long vowels. She smiles, the devil in her stretching and flexing its claws, and unbuckles his belt and pulls his jeans down and off, taking his boxers with them. His blood is pounding in his cock, and she strokes him for a moment as he moans “Oh, God” at the ceiling, and then she’s taking him in her mouth.

This, she enjoys. She savors the power she has over him the way she savored the whiskey before, breathing it in, holding it, enjoying it. She draws out a hundred gradations of sound from his throat with just a few different strokes of her tongue. She makes his heartbeat jump by swallowing him deep in one quick thrust. He tries to run a hand through her hair, but he loses even that fine motor movement when she swirls her tongue around his head. She knows he’s going to come before he does, and she doesn’t pull off, just swallows it down.

She catches her breath, leaning against Cathal’s thigh as he strokes her cheek with his thumb and says “Missed you, Mattie,” and she’d forgotten how much she loves the way her name sounds in his accent.

“I need a glass of water,” she says, and that’s the one part she hates about blowjobs: the feeling in her mouth after.

“Here, I’ll get it.” Cathal starts to move, but she pats his knee.

“I think I remember where your sink is,” she says as she gets to her feet. She snags her empty whiskey glass off the table, and holds out her hand to where the kitchen counter starts. She runs her hand along the tiny counter area until her fingers find metal, then follows the edge of the sink around until her fingers brush the faucet. Cathal pulls himself out of his chair while she fills her glass, and she drinks the whole thing as he’s moving around the table, coming up behind her and putting his hands on her hips, pressing his lips against the side of her neck.

She leans forward to put the glass down in the sink, and his hands travel up her back to her bra. He kisses her shoulder as he unclasps it, dropping it to the floor and taking her breasts in his hands, pulling her back against his chest. She sighs and lets her head loll back against his shoulder, letting his hands work her flesh, gasping when he pinches a nipple. She moans a little in protest when his hands leave her breasts to start sliding lower, but he’s unbuckling her belt and unzipping her fly, and his right hand is sliding down into her underwear while his left drifts back up to her breast. She grips the edge of the counter to stay upright. His fingers find her clit, and it isn’t long before she’s whispering “slow down, slow down,” because it’s too much, she can’t let him know, she can’t lose control.

He obeys her, pulling his hand out of her jeans, and reaching up with his other hand to turn her face for a kiss. His hand on her hip turns her so that her back is against the counter, and he presses the length of his body against her, his hand sliding back down into her pants. This time, he keeps it slow and gentle, and she lets her breathing match the strokes of his fingers until her body shakes against his in climax.

“You know,” he says, as she leans back against the counter, her chest heaving, “there are these brilliant things called beds, you might have heard of them.”

“Is yours covered in books?” It is, she can tell. 

“…give me two seconds.”

And she laughs as he clears his bed off, letting out a tiny “ah, feck” as he tries to maintain some sort of order to his research.

After she’s ridden him hard, they lie side by side, and Mattie can hear that he’s trying to sleep, but not succeeding. She can’t sleep either, the weight of the day coming crashing back to her, full of what-ifs and maybes, and guilt and regret. But she’s safe, Foggy’s safe, and Edward and Anna are safe, and maybe that’s all she can hope for today.

She turns to face Cathal, and strokes her hand down his arm, and when he pulls her to him, she lets her body remind itself again that she’s still alive.


	8. Course Correction

October, 2L

Josie’s is the platonic ideal of a dive bar. Every surface is slightly tacky, the lighting is inconsistent at best, and most of the bar rail booze is labelled in foreign languages.

Foggy loves it, even if Mattie cocks her head as if she’s scanning the room, then raises an eyebrow at him.

“Why are we here again?” She’s also not in a good mood.

“Because it's the first Friday night we’ve had all semester that we’ve actually had free time?”

“Yeah, but why _here_?”

“What, you never heard about Josie’s when you lived down here?”

“I was eighteen when I moved up to Columbia, I wasn’t exactly bar-hopping at that point.”

“Oh, c’mon, I remember people at school talking about this place. Rumour has it that Josie has a whole crate of some Eastern European booze that comes with an eel in it.”

“Please promise me that you’re not going to try to get me to drink it.”

“Chicken.”

Foggy had picked the place since Mattie was coming up from downtown, and he had to be down in Hell’s Kitchen anyway. His clinical placement this semester was with the Adolescent Representation Project, a choice that he’d never admit had been inspired by his orphaned best friend (he suspected she knew anyway). In the kind of symmetry that life sometimes has, St Agnes’ Orphanage had been damaged badly in the Battle of New York, and the nuns couldn’t house all the kids any more, so during the summer, Mattie had put Sister Magdalena in touch with Professor Kulik at the ARP, and now Foggy had wound up being given the cases of a few of the kids who were seeking emancipation. Everything comes full circle, he thought.

“I had coffee with Sister Magdalena after the meeting, by the way,” he says. “She said to say hi, and thanks for everything.”

“How’s she doing?”

“OK. Stressed, I think. The repairs are costing a lot, and she’s worried about the kids. She asked about you a lot.”

“That’s nice of her.”

“She asked if you had a girlfriend.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me.”

And Foggy grins at the bombshell he’s about to drop.

“And then she told me about catching you with…what was her name? Randy Sue or something?”

Mattie groans, and puts her head down on the table.

“Mary Sue. Mary Sue Poots,” she tells the table. She lifts her head. “She did not tell you that.”

“Yep. She apparently thinks it was hilarious and that you were cute together.” Mattie laughs at that. 

“She might have mentioned that back then,” she says, “instead of telling me to join the Catholic LGBT youth group.”

“How’d that go over?”

“‘Bout as well as you’d think. ‘No, you can’t tell me what to do, I’m fine on my own, I don’t need anyone’s help.’”

“So, exactly the way you’d react now.”

“Pretty much.” And she laughs, and relaxes infinitesimally.

“But seriously, buddy, she’s proud of you.”

“Thanks, man.”

“So, how was your day?”

Mattie has an externship with the U.S. Attorney’s office; after listening to her say for five years that she wanted to be a prosecutor, she’s finally on track to get there. She’d been ecstatic when she’d been accepted.

“Fine,” she says, taking another drink. Foggy recognizes her tells, now. She doesn’t want to talk about it, and that usually means she should.

“Really?”

“Yeah.” Foggy waits. “It’s just been a…weird couple of days.”

“What happened?”

She takes another drink.

“No, it’s - a few days ago, I was looking up some cases for precedent, and I ran across Roscoe Sweeney’s name.”

“Roscoe Sweeney?”

“The Fixer.”

Oh. Mattie had told him the story of her father’s death a few years ago, and she’d always referred to the mobster who had ordered it as The Fixer, never by name.

“I thought he wound up in jail,” Foggy says.

“He did. But, it turns out he didn’t stay there. He made a deal, turned state’s evidence on some bigger organized crime figures, was out in three years.” She takes another drink. “I googled him. He died of a heart attack two years ago. Free man.”

“Shit.” He doesn’t know what else to say. “I’m sorry” doesn’t seem quite right when talking about someone who deserved a lot worse.

“Yeah.” She sighs heavily. “And then - today, I had - I can’t talk about the specifics -” Not talking about the specifics of their cases is hard on them, they’re so used to sharing everything. “- but - uh, statistically speaking, the majority of women who are incarcerated are there on drug charges, and it’s usually due to a domestic partner or relative’s association with the drug trade…”

“And you hit the statistical jackpot today?”

“Ding-ding,” she says unenthusiastically. “And this hypothetical statistical jackpot, generally speaking, will be advised by her attorney to take a plea bargain, because, let’s face it, they’re probably court-appointed defenders who’re going to take the first bargain offered, and she’s probably so low on the totem pole that she can’t offer any evidence in exchange, so she’s going to wind up serving at least seven years when her asshole boyfriend -“

“- hypothetical boyfriend -“

“- yeah, sorry - gives evidence on someone higher up and gets five instead.”

Foggy watches her as she takes another drink, her forehead creased and her jaw tense.

“I just - this isn’t what I thought it was going to be.”

Foggy knows that she’d always wanted to be a prosecutor, ever since she’d decided she wanted to be a lawyer, or maybe since her dad died. Fighting the good fight, standing up for the victimized, and all that.

“Nobody said criminal law was going to be black and white, kitten.”

“I - I know. But - God, I can’t sit here and say that what happened today was justice, Foggy, I can’t. And you can’t tell me that what happened to The Fixer was justice either.” She lifts her glass to her lips, but it’s empty.

“You’re out. Want another one?”

“I shouldn’t.”

“OK. So, the big question…”

“Do I still want to be a prosecutor?” She’s frowning, and he realizes that this is what’s had her brooding in their apartment for weeks.

“Yeah.”

“Ugh, I don’t know! I don’t know. I thought I knew, I’ve wanted to for so long, I thought this was everything I wanted. What else would I do?”

“Anything? International law? Litigation? Intellectual property!” She gives a wan smile. “World’s your oyster. What were you planning on applying for next semester?”

“I was thinking about the Community Enterprise Clinic.”

“Good start, very wholesome and worthy, I’m sure Sister Magdalena will approve.” And that earns him an eye roll. “So try that. Or go crazy. Apply to, I don’t know, one of the defense externships, or something.”

“Not defense. I couldn’t represent someone I knew was guilty.”

“Innocent until proven guilty, kitten, remember? Besides, it sounds like you wanted to help that woman today.”

“Yeah,” she says quietly, “I did.”

“See? No-one’s saying that you need to be Johnnie Cochran. You can help people like her instead. Maybe you should give it a shot.”

“I’ll think about it.”

The next semester, she gets the Bronx Defenders Holistic Defense externship. And when she comes home from their office, she’s either glowing with pride, or quietly, terrifyingly furious, growling about cops and public benefits and institutionalized racism. At one point, she comes home bearing a bag of cookies that a client baked her, and threatens Foggy with bodily harm if he eats more than his share, even though they’re the cheap ready-made cookie dough that she usually disdains.

She’s happier than he’s ever seen her, so, yes, Foggy is a genius.

And Foggy’s loving his Mediation Clinic placement, but Corporate Law is kicking his ass, and if he hears the phrase “mergers and acquisitions” again, he’s going to scream. And he wonders if he shouldn’t take his own advice and go crazy.

Maybe he and Mattie can apply for the same externship for next semester. That would be awesome.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a short one today! But, wow, over 1000 hits as of yesterday! I'm really overwhelmed, since I didn't think anyone would be that interested. Thanks everyone for your comments and kudos!


	9. Not Just a River

July, 2L

“Hey, pretty lady,” comes Pam’s voice.

“Hey, you,” says Mattie, leaning on the raised part of Pam’s desk. “They’re sending me down to the courthouse to get Hogarth to sign these,” that would be the file in her hand, “and I was wondering if you want to come with and grab some lunch on the way back?”

“Oooh, courthouse. You do know how to show a girl a good time.”

“It’s a criminal trial, of course it’s a good time,” says Mattie, mock-offended.

“Only for lawyers. And law students.” Mattie hears Pam logging out of her computer and pressing the buttons on her phone to forward her calls to main reception. “But I’ve heard that there’s a food truck that parks near the courthouse that’s really good, so I’m in.”

Mattie slides the file into her bag before taking Pam’s arm, and they step out together into the sweltering heat of New York in July. It practically hits Mattie in the face, the heat and humidity, and Pam groans.

“Tell me we’re not taking the subway,” she says, and Mattie can hear her rummaging through her purse and putting on sunglasses.

“I’ve got a taxi chit, if you want to flag one down?”

Pam does, and they climb in, giving directions to the courthouse. Sitting back, Pam reaches over and takes Mattie’s hand.

They’ve been taking it slow, have only had time for a few dates since they met when Mattie started her internship at Hogarth, Chao & Benowitz in June, but Mattie likes Pam a lot. She’s sweet, and takes no shit, and has the most amazing breasts. Not to mention, that after Foggy met her last week, he’d declared that she’d found her dream girl. “She’s a hot Catholic lesbian who works in a law firm, kitten. You’ve got to lock that shit down.”

“So I heard that the new offices got delayed again,” says Pam. “We won’t be moving until the end of the year now.”

The Midtown West offices of HC&B had been damaged during the Battle of New York, so the firm had moved into smaller offices on Madison Avenue while the building was repaired. Ted Chao in particular has been unhappy with the temporary offices, complaining that he’d lost his view of the river. But the delay isn’t surprising, given the amount of reconstruction needed in Midtown.

Mattie doesn’t mind the size of the offices, since it gives her more excuses to run into Pam.

“How’d that go over?” asks Mattie.

“Usual. Chao bitched, Benowitz shrugged, and Hogarth just said ‘of course.’” Pam imitates Hogarth’s disappointed hauteur perfectly, and Mattie laughs.

“Well, at this rate, you’ll get your fancy new desk by the time you’re forty.”

“Ugh, shoot me if I’m there that long,” says Pam. On one of their early dates, she’d mentioned that she’d taken the job at HC&B to save up for an MBA. Mattie, out of loyalty, had strongly recommended Columbia’s program.

They step out of the cab into the sweaty heat, and Pam guides Mattie into the courthouse, getting directions to the right courtroom. They slip in the back, grabbing seats while the ADA examines a witness. It’s fairly straightforward, an obviously carefully constructed testimony built on the principle of “just the facts.”

Then Jeryn Hogarth stands up for cross.

Hogarth, Mattie thinks, is the walking definition of the term “ice queen.” She’s cool, calculating, and perfectly composed. Her voice is as precise as the sound of her heels clicking on the floor as she asks the witness questions that call into doubt the previous answers. She doesn’t convince the witness to explicitly contradict herself, but by the end, the woman sounds confused and unsure of anything she has said.

Next to Mattie, Pam’s heartbeat has risen in interest.

The judge calls a recess, and Pam takes Mattie down the aisle to Hogarth.

“Murdock? What are you doing here?” says the ice queen.

“Mr Chao asked me to come down and ask you to sign these?” says Mattie, pulling the file from her bag. “I can take them back to him after you’ve looked them over.”

“What -“ Hogarth cuts herself off as she takes the file and opens it. “Oh, right. I’ll look them over during the recess. You can meet me back here in an hour.” She pauses, and Mattie thinks she’s looking at Pam. “Pam, was there something you needed from me?”

“No, I just came to…” Pam is actually _flustered_ , Mattie realizes.

“She just wanted to see a criminal trial in action,” says Mattie, hoping that’s an acceptable excuse for Pam.

“Oh.” With that, Hogarth is striding away, the sound of her heels receding.

“Am I going to get fired?” asks Pam.

“I don’t think so,” says Mattie. “So, food truck?”

The food truck turns out to serve Korean-Mexican fusion tacos, which Pam declares delicious, and Mattie complains are too spicy. They sit in the hall in the courthouse to eat them, relishing the air conditioning.

“So you haven’t gone to any of Hogarth’s trials?” says Mattie.

“I actually have work to do while she’s in court, believe it or not. Besides, I always thought it would be kind of boring.”

“And was it?”

“OK, that was kind of interesting,” Pam admits. “Is it always like that?”

“Not always,” says Mattie, although she hasn’t been in court too many times herself. “But let’s be honest, Hogarth’s one of the best.”

“Admit it, you want to be her when you grow up.”

Mattie grins. “Not exactly, but it’s not a bad place to start.”

“Then who do you want to be?”

“Thurgood Marshall?”

Pam laughs, then says, “oh, shit” around a mouthful of taco.

“What?”

“You’ve got kimchi on your skirt.” She leans over and wipes at it with a napkin.

“Does kimchi stain?”

“Yeah, a lot. Hold on.” She’s rummaging through her purse, and then she pulls out something pen-shaped. She presses the tip to Mattie’s thigh, rubbing it in small circles. Mattie can feel the liquid seeping into the fabric of her skirt, and smell the detergent. “There. You’ll need to wash it when you get home, just to make sure.”

“Thanks.”

Mattie hears Hogarth’s heels coming down the hall, and quickly wipes at her face with a napkin to make sure she’s presentable before Hogarth can see her.

“Murdock, I’ve got that file for Ted. Hi, Pam,” she says, and for a moment, Mattie thinks the ice queen might have melted a little. Pam takes the file with a little “Hi,” and puts it in Mattie’s lap, and Mattie puts it back in her bag.

“Thanks, Ms Hogarth,” says Mattie, standing. “I’ll get them back to him right now.”

“When’s he expecting you back?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Well, he knows I’m in court, so he can’t be expecting you back too soon. Stick around for an hour and watch the trial. You too, Pam.” And there it is again, that infinitesimal thaw in her voice, and the tiniest quickening of her heartbeat.

“Thanks, Ms Hogarth. We will,” says Mattie.

The next hour is a bloodbath. The ADA presents an expert witness to testify to the defendant’s state of mind, and Hogarth crushes every single argument, and ultimately calls into question the witness’ research, qualifications, and, implicitly, his ethics and morality as a human being. It’s a thing of beauty. Mattie is absolutely fascinated, and she cocks her ear to the jury, and, yes, they’re eating out of Hogarth’s hand. And Pam…

Pam is _turned on_ by this.

Mattie almost turns her head to face Pam, but catches herself. Pam’s heart rate and body temperature are up, her breathing is heavier, and there’s the faintest scent of arousal coming from her body.

Oh, Mattie thinks, this explains so much.

Of course Pam would have a crush on Hogarth. She’s brilliant and tough, and, by all accounts, beautiful as well. And married. Very, very married. Mattie has run into her wife a few times at the office; it’s impossible Pam doesn’t know that.

“But we can’t control what we want, can we?” whispers the voice in her head, and she thinks of Foggy, and clamps that down because that’s the one thing she’s not allowed to think about.

After the witness steps down, Mattie and Pam slip out, and Mattie notices that Hogarth turns her head to watch them go.

“That was amazing!” gushes Pam in the cab back uptown. “I wish you could have seen the look on that guy’s face, he looked like he was going to jump over the rail and strangle Hogarth.”

“I could kind of tell,” says Mattie.

“God, she was like a tiger! There was this moment, when the guy admitted that his research hadn’t been peer-reviewed, and she wasn’t looking at him at all, just staring at the ADA like she was going to eat him alive.”

“I think she sort of did. Metaphorically.”

“Yeah, she totally did.”

Pam doesn’t stop talking about the trial for the whole cab ride.

After work, Mattie goes to Fogwell’s and takes out her tension on the punching bags.

She and Pam have only been dating for a few weeks, she thinks as she executes a combination on the bag. They aren’t girlfriends, they haven’t said they’re even serious or exclusive. So would it be wrong to keep dating, even if she knows Pam has a crush on Hogarth?

The smaller, quieter voice in her head says, “it’s not like _you_ don’t have feelings for someone else, too.”

Pam can’t date Hogarth; Hogarth is married, to a very nice woman, and that’s the end of that. So why can’t Pam date someone else (left hook, right uppercut, roundhouse kick)? Pam is attracted to her, she’s not lying about that, so why not Mattie?

“Because it’s not fair,” whispers the voice, “not to you, and not to her.” She stops, breathing heavily. She thinks of the girlfriends and boyfriends she’s had in college and in law school, and knows that she was never fair to them, either. Most of them had left saying that they knew she wasn’t really committed (or, more damning, that they were more interested in her than she was in them), and they’d been right. She’d made excuses, blamed her workload usually, but they’d been right.

She starts up again, pummelling the bag, trying to punch away any thoughts that strayed too close to the truth.

A few days later, Pam and Mattie go out for coffee after work. Mattie opens with “I don’t think this is going anywhere, do you?” and she can feel the tension drain from Pam, who says “Thank God, I was worried I was being awful for thinking that.”

And that’s that.

Pam surprises Mattie by asking her to go with her to some pop-up restaurant in Brooklyn anyway.

“Why me?”

“Because you’re the biggest food snob I know,” says Pam.

“I’m not a food snob, I just have a very sensitive palate.”

And like that, they’re friends. No fuss, no crying, no angry words. It feels terribly, frighteningly grown-up.

The restaurant in Brooklyn turns out to be great, too.


	10. El Grande Avocados

April, 3L

Mattie had been pissed at Foggy when he’d dragged her out tonight. Caitlin in their class had been complaining that no-one would come to her birthday drinks because it was so close to finals, so Foggy had promised that they would be there. And then informed Mattie that he’d promised that she’d be there.

The look on Mattie’s face had been priceless.

“I have a paper due next week, Foggy,” she’d said.

“And it’s going to be a heartbreaking work of staggering genius anyway, so you’re still coming.”

She’d complained earlier in the evening when he’d declared that it was time to go, but she’d put in an effort, and at least put on some lipstick (his job, as always, was to make sure her lipstick didn’t look insane) to hide the fact that she looked pale and tired. Not that anyone at Caitlin’s drinks had cared, since they all looked like that. They’d all decided to pack it in around eleven.

So here they are, wandering the campus in the middle of the night, drunk, but not quite drunk enough for Foggy’s taste, and Mattie is laughing in a way he hasn’t heard in a while. Good call, Foggy.

“How do you say ‘lawyers’ in Spanish?” he says, breaking off.

“Lawyers? _Abogados_ ,” she says.

“El grande avocados!” he declares, and Mattie laughs.

“That’s not Spanish, that’s fruit - that’s fruit. It’s a vegetable at best.”

They bicker about languages and their love lives (well, Mattie’s love life, mostly), and then they’re sitting on the steps, and Mattie’s telling him about her dad giving her Scotch when she was nine. She has that sad, soft look on her face that she always gets when she talks about him, the one that makes Foggy want to wrap her up in his arms.

“He’d be proud of you, kitten,” he says, and he means it.

“Thanks, man. All he ever wanted was for me to use my head, not my fists. Not like him.”

Which seems like an odd thing to say, but Foggy needs to make her smile again, so he says, “My mom wanted me to be a butcher,” and she laughs, so he keeps going. “I think she liked the idea of free ham.”

“Hey, they coming to graduation? Your family?” The Clan Nelson has already started making plans for the day, even though it’s weeks away.

“The whole extended brood. It’s not every day a Nelson breaks from the ranks of hardware and cured meats.”

“Franklin Nelson for the defense, Your Honor!” she says, draping her arm across his shoulders.

“Defense! I like that. There’s money in that.”

“Oh, come one. Is that all you care about?” And she’s looking at him - well, not _looking_ at him, but her damn pretty face is turned towards him like she can read his heart, or something.

“No. No! Truth and justice and all of that. Couple of bucks?” She laughs, leaning her head on his shoulder, and he puts his arm around her. “Me and you, pal. We’re gonna have big, fancy offices one day, with steel and glass, and chairs you don’t even know how to sit in. Murdock and Nelson, Attorneys at Law!”

“Nelson and Murdock,” she says, turning her face up to him. “Sounds better.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, trust me. I can’t see worth shit, but my hearing’s spectacular.” And Foggy presses his cheek against her hair, squeezing her tight, because this, this is how it’s supposed to be. Nelson and Murdock.

“Me and you, pal. We’re gonna do this. We’re gonna be the best damn avocados this city has ever seen.”

And she laughs, murmuring “Best damn avocados” against his shoulder.

“Let’s get the hell out of here, c’mon,” he says, standing up and holding out his hand. After some circling (Mattie keeps grabbing at air), he has her hand, and he pulls her up, but a little too hard, because she overbalances and winds up falling against his chest, laughing.

She’s standing on a higher step, so they’re almost eye to eye, and Foggy doesn’t know who makes the first move, because her hand is in his, and her other hand is gripping his jacket, her cane dangling from her wrist, and her lips are opening against his.

It’s not like any other time they’ve kissed. They’ve kissed at New Year’s and that one time after the thing with Professor York, but it’s always been carefully platonic, enough that they could deny that it was anything other than a friendly peck. This…is not a friendly peck. This is deniability thrown to the wind and the safety net torn down. This is six and a half years of delicately drawn boundaries being crossed with no warning.

This is love.

He doesn’t know how long it is until they surface for air. He leans his forehead against hers, and he can hear her breathing fast. He doesn’t want to say anything to break the spell, because what if she realizes what a huge mistake she’s made? But then she smiles, and it’s blinding, how beautiful her smile is, and she tilts her head in for more. He brings up his free hand to her cheek, holding her face there as he slides his tongue into her mouth, and she makes a little noise in her throat that he definitely wants to hear again.

Then she breaks the kiss, and Foggy knows that look on her face. It’s the one that says she’s hurt, and Foggy doesn’t know why she looks like that, but he gets a sinking feeling in his gut that it’s his fault.

“Foggy, I -“ and she kisses him again, fiercely, before she pulls away again. “I can’t do this drunk,” she says.

Shit, did she only kiss him because she’s drunk? He doesn’t think she’s that drunk, but he wasn’t keeping track of how many she had.

“I need - can we talk about this in the morning?” she says. “When we’re sober? Please?”

And Foggy’s gut drops out, but what can he say except “sure”?

The walk back to Lionsgate stretches out in awkward silence, and Foggy doesn’t complain that Mattie’s hand on his elbow is tighter than usual. Inside their apartment, Mattie just gives him a quick peck on the cheek before disappearing into her room, and Foggy throws himself fully clothed on his bed, because he’s pretty sure he’s just fucked up his life, and he doesn’t know how to fix it.

He wakes up to a pounding headache and the smell of coffee from the kitchen. He almost stumbles out as he is, but then he realizes that his clothes stink of last night’s drinks, so he changes into some fresh clothes before heading out to face Mattie.

She’s in a tank top and sweat pants in the kitchen, with her thick socks pulled up over the pants cuffs, drinking a cup of coffee at the kitchen table. It strikes Foggy that she may be small, but there are muscles on her shoulders and arms that look pretty formidable, and he wonders why he never noticed before.

Because you weren’t supposed to look at her like that anymore, he thinks.

“Hey,” she says. “I made coffee.”

“Yeah, thanks,” he says, going over to pour himself a cup. There’s Advil on the counter next to the coffee machine, so he snags two caplets and drinks them with a glass of water before sitting down opposite her with his coffee. She’s not wearing her glasses, and it makes her look so much younger than twenty-five. Her eyes seem fixed on a spot on the table.

“OK, do you want to go first, or should I?” he says. Please let me go first, he thinks.

Her chin jerks up, and now her eyes are at least level with his, even if she can’t meet them.

“I -“ She cuts herself off, then starts again. “I shouldn’t - I shouldn’t have stopped things like that last night,” she says, and that’s not quite what Foggy was expecting. “I didn’t want you to think - I didn’t want to stop, Foggy, please believe me, but I couldn’t keep going without…” She trails off into silence, her face turning down to the table again.

“Without what?” Foggy’s completely lost now, because this is not the conversation he thought they were having.

“I need to tell you about me. About what I can do.” And what the hell?

So she tells him about a world on fire.

And the one thing he thought he could rely on, the fact that he could trust Mattie Murdock, goes up in flames.

“So,” he says, swallowing his anger down, “you can see.”

“That’s not - you’re not - are you even listening to what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, world on fire, I got it. But you can see, right?”

“No, Foggy, I can’t,” and she’s getting snippy, which means she’s getting angry, too. “I can do pretty much everything except see.”

“Like what? Can you read my mind? Can you predict the future?”

“It’s not like that, I just - I just know things, OK?”

“No, not OK. What things do you just know?”

She shakes her head in frustration. “I know…you haven’t showered since yesterday morning, and you haven’t brushed your teeth since then either. I know you had a burrito for lunch two days ago. I know your hangover is killing your stomach right now, and I know the more I say, the faster your heart beats.”

“You can hear a heartbeat? From over there?”

“I can do it from across a room. Or further, sometimes. It helps to anticipate behaviour, tell when someone’s lying.”

And Foggy remembers Mattie standing in their living room, telling him that she knew York had lied to her.

“That’s how you knew York was lying.”

“Yeah.”

“You listened to his heartbeat without his permission? You can’t do that! It’s weird and invasive, and he’d probably sue you if he knew -“

“Foggy -“

“Are you telling me that since I’ve known you, any time I wasn’t telling the truth, you knew?” Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out. “And what, you just played along?”

“Basically.”

And the world stops as Foggy realizes that he’s never had any secrets from her.

“So you knew. All along,” he says, his voice ice cold.

“Knew what?”

Foggy can barely put it into words. “About how I felt. About you.”

“No, Foggy, I knew you were attracted to me -“

“Oh God.”

“But that was back in freshman year, and I wasn’t the only one - you had a crush on Jason too, for Christ’s sake -“

“You knew about that too? What, you’ve just been laughing at me the entire time?”

“No, Foggy -“

And Foggy knows exactly where to hit, how to make her hurt as much as she’s hurt him.

“All these years, I actually felt sorry for you.” 

She looks like he’s punched her, and for a moment, he regrets the words, but then she fights back.

“I didn’t ask for that! I never - I never asked for that!” She’s shouting at him now, and he matches her.

“Yeah, I didn’t ask to be lied to! You’ve lied to me, since the day we met.” He shoves his finger in her face, even though - oh, wait, she can tell, he knows that now.

“What did you expect me to say, Foggy? ‘Hi, I’m Mattie. I got some chemicals splashed in my eyes when I was a kid that gave me heightened senses.’”

“Six years, Mattie, I’ve known you for six years, you could have told me any time!” He stops, shaking. “Was anything ever real with us?”

Because that’s the question. If she knew about his feelings, then she’s spent six and a half years playing him, letting him watch her bring home the gorgeous girls and boys that she goes through like tissue, reminding him deliberately of what he could never have. So what was last night? Her throwing him a bone? Or her seeing how badly she could twist him around her fingers?

“Foggy -“ she starts, but he cuts her off.

“I can’t look at you right now,” he says, and he’s grabbing his coat and out the door before she can say anything else.

As he closes it, he hears the sound of a mug smashing, but he can’t bring himself to care enough to go back.


	11. Heartbeat

April, 3L

Mattie Murdock doesn’t cry.

Which is not exactly true. She cried when her father died, and she cried when Stick left. She cries at Pixar movies when Foggy describes them to her. 

But she has never cried for a lover. She refuses to let someone have that kind of hold on her.

Which is why she is furious at herself for sobbing at her kitchen table, the smashed remnants of a mug of coffee scattered on the kitchen floor.

She tries to cover it up at first, covering her mouth with her hands as Foggy’s heartbeat recedes down the hall, but she soon gives up, and her entire body is wracked with the force of it. She doesn’t know how she ends up on the floor, her knees pulled up to her chest.

“You can never have any of that,” says Stick, in her head, and she’s tried so damn hard, she’s tried for twelve years to prove him wrong, but he was right, the bastard.

She doesn’t know how long she stays there, but eventually her body stops shaking. She feels lightheaded. She grabs the counter edge and pulls herself up, and drinks a glass of water. She can feel the tears that have dried on her face, and she wipes away the snot from her nose, and she’s never felt more small and worthless, because Foggy hates her, and she can never undo what she’s done.

She can never take back the lies she told him, and he’ll never forgive her for that.

She dutifully sweeps up the ceramic shards from the mug she’d thrown against the wall, and throws them away.

They have just over a month until the school year is over. Both of them have papers to write and finals to study for, and placements to attend, so Mattie does some quick calculations, and, yes, it will be possible for them to get through the next month without actually having to speak to each other, and then they can move out like they had planned, but now they won’t be finding a place together, and go their separate ways. The thought feels like a lead weight in her stomach, but she can’t stand to hear the anger in Foggy’s voice again.

So she avoids him. She ensures that she’s not wherever he is; she sits at the back of the classrooms so she can sprint out before him, she leaves the library whenever she hears his heartbeat coming up, she goes to Fogwell’s late in the evenings so he’ll be asleep when she comes home. She might, just once, parkour down a stairwell so she doesn’t have to run into him.

It works for a week.

Then she’s coming home from the library close to midnight, and her paper is due tomorrow, and she just needs that damn book that’s sitting on her desk so she can get the correct citation, and then she can write the conclusion, and then the damn paper will be done.

And Foggy is sitting on the couch.

She knows it as she walks down the hall to their apartment. She can hear his heartbeat, elevated, nervous, it sounds like, and she suddenly knows why he’s waiting for her.

She wonders if he’ll yell at her again, or if he’ll just tell her to pack and go without any further discussion. She wonders where she’ll go. Pam might put her up for a few days, she thinks. She’s a good friend. Not like Mattie.

So she opens the door, steels herself for the confrontation, and then, because she’s a coward, makes a beeline for her room instead.

“Aw, Jesus, Mattie -“ says Foggy before she reaches her door.

“What?” she snaps.

“Will you - seriously, you’ve been avoiding me all week.” He sounds more exasperated than angry. She turns to face him.

“Yeah, well, I thought you didn’t want to look at me.”

“I - yeah, I did say that.” She hears him swallow. “Look, I need to talk to you, and I’ve been waiting for you to get home -“

“What, sitting here like a psychopath?”

“No, I’ve been -“ he gestures at his laptop, which is open on the coffee table. “Look, will you just sit down and have a beer and let me talk for two seconds?”

So she tosses her bag and her cane into her room, and sits down on the couch while Foggy gets them beers from the fridge. He holds one out to her, nudging her hand out of habit.

“Oh,” he says, “I guess you don’t really need me to do that, huh?” He sounds so defeated.

“No,” she says, taking the bottle without hesitation. She takes a drink, and she hears Foggy take that little breath he always does before he starts talking.

“I’ve been looking up - you remember that huge intelligence leak a few weeks ago? From SHIELD?”

She nods. She’d browsed through some of the files herself, particularly the ones on enhanced humans, hoping against hope that there might be anyone like her. And maybe looking for information on an old blind man who was an expert in martial arts.

“OK, after…what happened…I had a look at some of their files. I wanted - I don’t know - to find out more? About people like you?”

“You mean freaks like me,” she says bitterly.

“I - no, I don’t mean that,” he says quietly. “There was a lot, you know? Some of those people, I mean, it’s crazy what they can do, I don’t even think some of them obey the laws of physics. But I found the procedures on what they do when they find someone with…abilities? And…I think I get it.”

“Get what?”

“Why you’re afraid of someone finding out.”

She doesn’t say anything, just takes a drink of beer, because he’s tapped a nightmare she hasn’t even thought about for years, something primal that she thought she’d overcome.

“I mean,” he says to fill the silence, “the shit they’re talking about in the SHIELD files, it’s real Men in Black, River-Tam-at-the-Academy scary shit. They even had a registry, they called it the Index -“

“I know,” she says. “I read the files.” She takes a deep breath, and tries the truth for a change. “When I was at St Agnes’, I had this nightmare, that someone found out about me, and I’d wind up tied to a table while someone cut pieces out of me.” She hears Foggy’s breath catch.

“Well, turns out you weren’t too far off,” he says grimly.

“Yeah.”

They take a drink of beer.

“So I think I get it,” Foggy says. “Why you don’t tell anyone. But…”

“I should have told you,” Mattie finishes.

“Yeah, you should have.”

They take another drink.

“I’m sorry,” Mattie says. “I know it doesn’t change anything, but…you’re right, I should have trusted you, I just didn’t know how to say it, and then it had been so long, and I couldn’t tell you that I’d been lying all this time, and…”

His heart is beating faster, now, but she can’t say the words, she needs to hold onto this one last secret.

“Why did you tell me, then?”

She lets out a puff of air, and throws her head back against the couch.

“You know why,” she says to the ceiling.

“Let’s assume that I don’t know anything about Mattie Murdock,” he says sadly.

“Because we…” she gestures vaguely. “Because you kissed me.”

“Uh, correction, _you_ kissed _me_.”

“You started it.”

“Are we going to fight about this?”

“Fine, we made out.” Foggy makes a noise of assent. “And I - I couldn’t let anything happen with you if you didn’t know. I couldn’t do that to you.”

“Why?” Foggy’s heart is hammering in his chest.

“Because I love you.” And there it is: her heart, raw and bleeding for him to see.

He takes a drink of beer, but his heart is still pounding.

“You really didn’t know, did you?” he says.

“Know what?”

“How I felt about you. Feel.”

She takes a deep breath, because she needs to explain this properly, but the word “feel” has made a tiny bubble of hope rise in her chest.

“There’s a difference between attraction and love. Attraction’s physical, love is…”

“Not. Or not just.”

“Yeah. Guess which one I can tell.”

He nods. “I just nodded,” he says, and stops. “Guess you already knew that.”

“Yeah.”

“So you didn’t know.”

“Foggy, I swear to God, if I had known, I would have told you a long time ago. And I should have anyway, I know, but, God, I was so scared, because what if we screwed it all up?”

And he laughs. He honest-to-God laughs.

“Kitten, what would we screw up? We’ve lived together for five and a half years. I put the toilet seat down for you, you take care of me when I’m hung over. I have seen you when you haven’t showered in days, what do you think could scare me off?”

“Uh, chemically-induced hyper-senses?”

“Which are weird and slightly creepy and are going to take some getting used to, and I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the whole heartbeat thing, but…I’m not… _scared_ of you.”

And hope is a terrible thing, so she blurts out, “I don’t know, what if we had really terrible sex?”

“Seriously? You think would happen?”

“No, but what if it did?”

“Then we’d talk about it like the adults we occasionally pretend to be.” And he’s reaching over to her, cupping her face in his hand, his fingers in her hair. “I love you. I think I’ve loved you since you walked into my room in freshman year. And we won’t screw this up.”

And the possibility sits there, between them, and she needs to hear him say it.

“So…you really want to do this, then?”

“Well, unless you have more deep dark secrets that you’re keeping,” and he sees the look on her face. “Seriously, are there more deep dark secrets?”

She opens her mouth, and she can’t quite put the words together, so she sighs in frustration.

“It’s kind of tied into the whole hyper-senses thing,” she says, and she tells him about Stick.

“You’re shitting me,” Foggy says as she finishes, passing her another bottle of beer and sitting sideways so that he’s facing her. “An old blind man taught you the ancient ways of martial arts. Isn’t that the plot to _Kung Fu_?”

And she laughs. “I don’t know, probably. I know how it sounds.”

“OK, serious question: is your life actually a comic book? Like, you get superpowers -“

“They’re not really superpowers.”

“ _Superpowers_ , and then your dad dies and Yoda comes to train you.”

“He wasn’t like Yoda, he was more like…what’s the guy’s name from _Kill Bill_?”

“What, Pai Mei?”

“Yeah, him.”

“Shit. So, is that what you do when you go to the gym?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh. I always figured it had something to do with your dad.”

“It might,” she admits. “But I like it. I’m good at it, it helps me think, and reminds me that I’m not…”

“Helpless,” he finishes.

“Yeah.”

“So, how good are you?”

“I don’t know? No, I know I’m good, I just - I don't know what competitive fighting’s like, I don’t know how I’d rank, but I can definitely hold my own.”

“Nope. You’re just screwing with me now.”

“I’m not. You can come to the gym with me and I’ll show you.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

“Well, I can definitely kick _your_ ass.” And they're laughing, and maybe, maybe she can have this.

Then his fingers are brushing a strand of hair away from her face, and he says “Hey,” and he’s kissing her, gently, like he’s afraid to startle her. She opens her lips, and for a moment their tongues meet, before he’s pulling away.

“Just a sec,” he says, and he takes the beer out of her hand, and puts both bottles down on the coffee table. And his arm slips around her waist, and the other into her hair, and she can taste everything he’s eaten in the past few days, but they all come together to something that just tastes of _him_. He adjusts his grip on her, and presses her back so that she’s under him on the couch, and if they keep going, she’s never going to stop.

Sometimes, she hates being the one in control.

“Wait, stop, stop.” He sits up, holding up his hands to show he’s not touching her.

“What’s wrong?”

“No, it’s not - nothing’s wrong,” she says, sitting up and putting her hands on his chest. “But - I have a paper due tomorrow! And so do you!” There’s a moment of silence.

“Oh, shit!” he says, climbing off the couch.

“You have started it, right?”

“Yeah, I have…a draft…” It’s not a lie. Not exactly, anyway.

“OK, we should go finish those,” she says.

“Right.”

“Wait,” she says, and she has him by the front of his shirt, and she kisses him, just to make herself clear.

“Hey,” he says, “when you’re done, come over to my room?”

“Yes. Go write your damn paper, Foggy.”

It’s not the worst conclusion she’s ever written, but it is, for want of a better word, rushed. She doesn’t put it through her usual multiple re-reads, having her screen reader repeat it over and over until she’s sure of it. Instead, she prints it, binds it in a folder, and throws it in her bag, butterflies in her stomach. She can hear Foggy typing in his room, his headphones playing the _Once_ soundtrack on repeat. She hums along to “Falling Slowly” as she changes into pyjamas and brushes her teeth. As she’s washing her face, she has a panicked thought that maybe she should change into something sexy? What does she own that’s sexy? She has that one set of silk lingerie that she’d bought as a graduation present for herself when they’d finished undergrad. And then the voice in her head says “it’s _Foggy_ , for God’s sake. Don’t be an idiot.”

His door is open, so she leans into his room.

“Hey.”

He pulls the headphones out. “Hey.”

“Is that invitation still open?”

“Yes! But, uh, I’m still going…”

“It’s OK,” she says. “I can just curl up here. No rush.”

“Oh, OK,” he says as she tucks herself into his bed. He turns back to his computer, then suddenly turns back. “Hey, can you hear the music when I’ve got the headphones in?”

“Yeah, I can.”

“Do you want me to turn it down?”

“No, you can take the headphones out, if you want. I like _Once_.”

And the music comes over the speakers ( _Are you really here, or am I dreaming?_ ), and even if she hates digital audio, this is perfect. Almost.

“That’s a little on the nose,” she says with a laugh.

“Purely coincidental.”

“Sure.” And she closes her eyes, and lets the music wash over her and Foggy’s scent surround her. ( _I wonder if you could ever despise me when you know I really tried…_ ) Then Foggy’s climbing into bed next to her, and she hadn’t realized that she’d fallen asleep.

“Sorry,” he says, “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“I was just dozing. You get your paper done?”

“Yeah.” He kisses her lips, because they can do that now. “I’m pretty sure the prof is going to cry. Good or bad tears, I don’t know, but he’ll definitely cry.”

“I’m sure it’s great,” she says, and they kiss again. He tastes of toothpaste, and he’s not wearing a shirt. His arm wraps around her waist so that they’re chest to chest, and she can feel his heart beating against her breasts.

“Go back to sleep, kitten,” he says softly. “We don’t have to do anything right now.”

She slides her leg up over his, and rolls them so that she’s astride his lap, her tongue in his mouth. 

“Like hell,” she whispers when she breaks away.

“Oh, thank God.”

And they’re laughing together before they’re back to making out, and Foggy’s hands are gripping her ass tightly, and then he grins against her mouth.

“What?”

“No, it’s just - do you have any idea how long I’ve wanted to get my hands on this?” He gives her ass a squeeze, and she laughs.

“I’m going to guess somewhere around six years?”

“Yep. Day one, you were wearing those tight jeans -“ and he slaps her ass on “tight,” making her give a little yelp and giggle against his mouth.

Then he’s sitting up, his hand sliding up from her ass under her t-shirt, pulling it up over her head. It winds up somewhere on the floor. Foggy sits back for a moment, and she reaches out to him, letting her fingertips drift over his face, trying to read his expression. He turns his face and plants a kiss into the centre of her palm. The fingers of one hand slide up her spine, making her shiver, then float over her shoulder, and down her chest to her breast. He uses his whole hand to massage her breast, just hard enough to make her gasp, then his other hand is at the back of her head, pulling her mouth down to his. Her hands bury themselves in his hair as the hand working on her breast makes her moan into his mouth when he catches her nipple between his fingers, and he grins, planting kisses along her jaw until he’s worked his way to her ear, and his tongue is tracing the shape of it and his teeth are tugging at the lobe. She’s panting now, God, she’s getting close -

“Slow down, slow down,” she says, because that’s what she’s learned to do, that’s what she’s always had to do.

He pulls away from her ear, his hand stilling on her breast.

“What - are you OK?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, I’m fine, I just -“

“Oh,” he says. “Is this a super-senses thing?” The hand that was cupping the back of her head comes around to her face, and she leans her cheek against it.

“Yeah.”

“Am I hurting you?”

She shakes her head against his hand. “No…no, I’m just…really, _really_ sensitive.”

“ _Oh_ ,” he says. “Are you…are you close? Just from this?” He squeezes her breast gently, but it’s enough to make her breath catch.

“ _Yes_.”

And his body temperature is rises at that.

“That’s…” Weird? Awkward? “…amazing,” he whispers, then he kisses her lips. “I think I’m definitely coming around to this whole super-senses thing.”

And she realizes that she’s never slept with someone who knew about her, and it’s _Foggy_ , he won’t judge her, he won’t take advantage, she’s safe with him, and she wants everything he’s willing to give.

“Just…keep doing what you were doing,” she whispers against his lips.

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

And his mouth trails down her throat to her breast, and his hand is working at the other one, and when his teeth grip at her nipple, she cries out and her body shudders as she comes. He holds her tight with his arms around her waist and presses his face against her chest until she’s stopped shaking, then his face turns up to her.

“I love you,” he says.

“I love you.” She strokes his cheek, feeling his contented smile. She lets her hand drift down, over his chest and belly, but he catches her wrist before she can slide it into the waistband of his pyjamas.

“Not yet. I’m not done with you,” and she’s never heard him sound so _wicked_ as he rolls them so that he’s on top of her, her legs wrapping around him.

He kisses her mouth, and down her throat and chest to her belly, and then he’s pulling her pyjama bottoms and underwear off, and every inch of her skin feels like it’s on fire. He hesitates after he tosses her clothes away, and she reaches up to his face.

“What is it?”

“You…” and he presses her back against the bed, “are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

She should say something, return the compliment, but he cuts her off by leaning down to kiss her again. His hand slides up her thigh from her knee, until he’s stroking her between her legs, and her senses are both stretching out around her and laser-focussed on the fingers on her clit, and she comes quickly, her fingers clutching at the sheets beneath her.

“How are you doing?” he murmurs as she catches her breath. He’s still on top of her, propping himself up on his elbows on either side of her. She can smell herself on his hand as she breathes in deeply, and it only makes her wetter.

“I don’t think there’s a word for how I’m doing,” she says.

She hears him give the little exhale that means that he’s smiling broadly.

“You want to take a break?”

“No.” She reaches up and takes his face in both her hands. “I don’t want to stop.”

And this time, he lets her push his pyjamas down and off him and stroke him, feeling him get even harder in her hand. His blood is rushing and his heart is pounding, and the room is filled with their mingled scents, and the world on fire is an inferno of sex and sweat and Foggy. 

He fishes a condom out of the bedside table and puts it on. She lies back, pulling him down on top of her, feeling his skin against hers, and then he’s inside her. For a moment, he holds still, and she wraps her body around his, and then he’s filling her, filling her senses, and as he moves inside her she can feel his heart beating against hers, as if their bodies were melting together.

She comes before he does, and then they’re lying tangled together. Foggy tells her he loves her again before getting up and heading to the bathroom, and she reins in her senses until she’s something like back to normal, just lying in Foggy’s bed, tasting sex in the air. She stretches, and thinks that she’s going to have to introduce Foggy to her silk sheets because she’s not putting up with this sandpaper crap, and Foggy laughs from the doorway.

“Oh, my God, you really are a kitten,” he says.

She gives him the finger as he starts climbing into bed, and he just grabs her hand and presses his lips to the upraised digit. He pulls her against him as he lies down, and she winds up resting her head on his chest, one arm draped over him, as his hand strokes her hair.

“Ask you a question?” he says.

“Sure.”

“It’s…really personal.”

“Foggy, you were literally _inside_ me a few minutes ago, I think you can ask a personal question.”

“OK…I was wondering, what’s it like for you? Sex, I mean.”

She hesitates, because she’s never had to put it into words.

“It’s, uh, pretty intense? But in a good way. I mean, if I’ve got the right partner.” She puts her lips to his skin for a moment.

“Yeah?”

“Mm-hmm. I mean, my senses can get overloaded really easily, it’s like everything’s jacked up at the same time, but it can almost be…intoxicating when it happens. But, this…” She slides her hand over his skin. “Skin against skin, that feeling, that’s the best part.” And then, because she’s trying to be honest, she says, “Well, almost.”

“Almost?”

She squirms a little, not sure how he’s going to take it.

“When you’re…you know, in the middle of it, I can feel your heart beat. Not just in your chest,” and she taps a finger against his, “but…I can feel your heart beat inside me.” His hand on her hair stills, and his breathing is ragged. She lifts her head so that he can see her face. “Sorry, was that weird? I know you’re not entirely cool with the whole heartbeat thing.”

“No…no, not weird. Possibly the hottest thing I’ve ever heard, so, definitely not weird.” She kisses him for that, then settles her head back down on his chest. “Wait, are you listening to my heartbeat right now?”

“…yes.”

“Creep,” he says fondly, and his heartbeat spikes for a moment.

“Liar,” she murmurs.


	12. Sirens

January, Landman & Zack

Mattie has never slept well.

After the accident, her senses were overstimulated, and she could only fall asleep out of sheer exhaustion. Even once she could control them better, the smallest interruption or irritation could jolt her awake. Sleeping next to Foggy helps; his heartbeat is calm and soothing, and having it next to her helped her fall asleep all through finals and the bar exam.

His heartbeat doesn’t help with the nightmares, but she learned a long time ago how to deal with those. She successfully kept that part of her from Foggy for a few months, until he’d come home after she’d gone to bed one night, and woken her from a particularly bad one. His heart had been pounding, and he’d sounded so worried, and she’d just felt guilty. He’d asked her to wake him up whenever she had one, but she only told him about the bad ones. She could handle the rest.

They’d moved back to Hell’s Kitchen after finals. Mattie loves the old neighborhood (and had been incredibly smug when people had reverted to calling it Hell’s Kitchen thanks to the destruction the aliens had wrought), and the rents are incredibly cheap these days. Their new place is a ridiculously spacious one-bedroom with exposed beams and brickwork whose only drawback is the garish billboard atop the building across the street. Foggy put up blackout curtains, and Mattie put down traps for the mice he hadn’t even known they had (“Everywhere in Manhattan has mice, Foggy, and don’t ask me about cockroaches.”), and they both love it. It even has roof access, which she uses to go parkouring, and they’re close to the subway, so getting to Landman & Zack is easy.

It doesn’t change the fact that Mattie isn’t sleeping.

The internship at L&Z isn’t helping, either. They’re both working seven days a week, well over twelve hours a day, and she’s incredibly grateful that they share an office (broom closet, really), because otherwise they’d literally never talk each other. Mattie has taken to going to the gym early in the morning, so Foggy’s still asleep when she leaves, and when they get home at the end of the night, Foggy will collapse into bed while she stays up to work on whatever they’ve thrown at her. They haven’t had sex in ages because neither of them can summon the energy, and they’re surviving on a diet of coffee and foods sold wrapped in bread. And every time Mattie reminds herself that this is what they worked for, she wonders if this is really what she wanted.

Roy Zack drags Mattie up to his office one day, and greets her with a gruff “Murdock, you have defense experience, right?”

“I took a few defense externships in law school?”

“Well, get ready to play with the big boys. We’ve just got court-assigned an attempted murder case.” He holds out the file, but she doesn’t react. “Um, I’ve got the file right here…”

“Oh,” she says, and holds out her hand, and he gives her the file. “You want me to second chair?”

“No, you’re lead counsel. Case is yours.”

Mattie’s sure her jaw is on the floor.

“Mr Zack, I’m not sure I’m qualified to -“

“Murdock, we’re committed to five thousand hours of pro bono work, but we never said it had to come from someone _qualified_. No offense.”

“Could I get another intern to co-counsel? Nelson -“

“We can’t afford to put two of you on this. Unless you’re saying that you require his assistance?” 

There’s an edge to that question, so she just says, “No, I’ll be fine.”

“Good.”

She feels shell-shocked as she makes her way back to their broom closet. Foggy tries to cheer her up by saying “Baby’s first defense case!”, but she can tell he’s disappointed that he couldn’t join her.

“You’re gonna be great,” he says, and kisses her.

“Thanks Foggy. Now piss off, I need to scan this file, and the arraignment’s in two hours.”

Her client is one Ivan Mokhov, charged with attempted murder and assault in the first degree (and disturbing the peace, and a few other sundry charges). Mokhov was involved in an “altercation” at a strip club last night, in which his opponent, Radoslav Pastukh, was stabbed multiple times. The weapon was not recovered at the scene. According to Mokhov’s statement, Pastukh had received a lap dance from a dancer Mokhov had previously arranged to dance for _him_ , and when Mokhov had confronted him, Pastukh had pulled the knife and attacked him. The dancer’s statement can only confirm that the two men had shouted at each other in Russian (which she doesn’t speak), and then physically fought, but she couldn’t say for certain which one had attacked first. The footage from the security cameras is inconclusive. Pastukh had given a statement to police at the hospital, but it had only amounted to “He attacked me.”

And this? This is why Mattie didn’t want to be a defense attorney.

So she’s in a bad mood as she heads to the courthouse, and her mood gets darker as she talks to her client before the arraignment. He lies to her every step of the way.

“Were you trying to kill him?” she blurts out.

“No, he try to kill _me_ ,” he says, his heart saying _lie, lie, lie_.

While she waits for the arraignment (the court is running behind, as usual), she listens to the case before hers. The defendant speaks very little English, so his attorney is translating as best he can. Bail is set at one hundred thousand dollars, and the defendant turns in a panic to his attorney.

“How much did she say?” he asks in Spanish.

“One hundred thousand, Luiz,” the attorney says in the same language.

“I don’t have that much money!”

“Then you’re going to be remanded. I’m sorry.”

“But I’ll lose my job! I didn’t do anything.” Luiz isn’t lying, and Mattie’s heart breaks a little. The scent of cheap cologne and cigarettes wafts through the building, making her nose itch.

The judge calls them up, and they enter a not guilty plea as the man wearing the cologne and stinking of cigarettes enters the courtroom. The ADA (Tower, she thinks his name is) argues for a higher bail based on the attempted murder charge, and Mattie argues that the fight was in self-defense. She can barely keep from rolling her eyes as she says it. Bail is set at thirty thousand.

Tower snags her as she’s leaving the courtroom.

“Hey, Murdock, right?”

“Yeah?”

“Blake Tower, from the DA’s office?” He holds out his hand.

“Hi,” she says, holding her hand out a few inches way from his.

“Got a minute?”

Tower offers her a plea bargain: they’ll drop the attempted murder charge in exchange for a guilty plea to the assault charge.

“I think we both know that won’t make a difference in sentencing,” she says with a smile.

“Fine, we’ll bump it down to assault two, he does seven years, max.”

“I’ll tell my client.” She turns to go.

“You think he’s guilty though, don’t you?” That stops her in her tracks.

“Nobody cares what I think,” she says.

Mokhov takes the deal, and that’s Mattie’s first defense case concluded. As she leaves the courthouse, she smells cigarettes and cologne and hears something muttered in Russian, but the guy doesn’t follow her.

When she gets back to the office, the receptionist tells her that Zack wants to see her.

“How’d it go?” he asks as she steps into his office.

“The DA’s office offered us a plea bargain, and the client has agreed to take it. The attempted murder charge was dropped, and the assault charge downgraded to second degree.”

“Good work, Murdock.” He pauses. “You don’t look happy.”

“May I speak frankly?”

“Sure.”

“I think he did try to kill Pastukh.”

“That’s not your place to decide.”

“I know, but -“

“No, no, listen to me, Murdock.” Zack’s voice is surprisingly gentle. “You’re an attorney. You don’t get to play judge and jury. There’s a reason that justice is supposed to be blind. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“You did your job, and, if, _if_ you’re right, your guy’s going to be in jail for a few years, hopefully not trying to kill people. So you’ve done a good day’s work, and you’ve earned a good night’s sleep.”

She doesn’t sleep. She listens to Foggy snoring, and pours herself a whiskey as the sirens swirl through the city. It’s worse than she remembers from when she lived down here as a kid, and it’s definitely worse than it ever was up in Morningside Heights; she suspects that it started getting worse when the Battle of New York turned Midtown West back into Hell’s Kitchen. She wonders if she had heard the sirens that had headed to the strip club last night to arrest Mokhov, or the ones that had been sent to pick up Luiz, but they probably got lost in the cacophany. 

And she wonders how many people need help, but who never hear the sirens coming to them.

“Mattie?” Foggy’s standing in the doorway to the bedroom. “Come to bed, it’s late.”

“Can’t sleep,” she says. She hears him flick on a lamp.

“Do you ever?” he says. He sounds concerned.

“I’m fine, Foggy.”

“Really? How many hours do you get a night?” He’s sitting down on the couch next to her.

“Enough. Don’t worry about me, Foggy.”

He nods. “You know, when we first got together, I thought it was me. I thought my snoring was keeping you up.”

“Foggy -“

“And then I thought that it was finals and the bar exam, because God knows the stress was going to kill one or both of us. But that’s over,” he reaches out and strokes her hair, “and it’s not getting better, is it?”

“It’s always been like this,” she says.

“Is this a super-senses thing?” It’s his go-to question when he wants to help her and doesn’t know how.

“I guess?”

She can’t tell him about the case, even if Mokhov didn’t even know how much he was giving away. So instead, she tells him about the sirens in the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zack's line "You're an attorney" is from Daredevil vol. 4 #15.1 by Mark Waid, Marc Guggenheim, and Chris Samnee.


	13. Blood Roses

August, Hell's Kitchen

Mattie is screaming his name. In the best way. In the shaking-the-walls, waking-the-neighbors kind of way.

And Foggy is too far gone to care if Fran hears them, because all he cares about is that Mattie is coming underneath him, her muscles tightening and her body shaking, and then he stops being gentle, and moves inside her harder and faster until he falls over the edge too.

God, he loves her.

This is definitely the best part of being (temporarily) unemployed - they don’t have to worry about getting up in the morning, so all-night sexy times are now a thing they can do. He’s willing to bet she’ll be up for round three (ninja stamina FTW) once he cleans himself up from round two.

It won’t last; they’ve got a meeting with the bank next week about their business loan, and they’re steadily and surely lining up everything they need to start Nelson & Murdock. So Foggy’s going to take advantage of this time as much as he can.

Only, when he gets back to the bedroom, instead of finding his girlfriend naked and gorgeous in bed, she’s pulling on sweatpants and a tank top, a look of near-panic on her face.

“What’s going on?”

“I heard something,” she says, grabbing her sneakers out of her gym bag.

That could mean anything. She can hear a cat meowing three blocks away (he thinks, she’s never been very specific about what she can and can’t hear), so it could mean she’s heard Timmy fallen down the well, or it could mean that there’s a tap dripping across the street.

“What’d you hear?”

“I…I need to go find out,” is all she says. Then she’s running up the stairs to the roof, and she’s gone.

Foggy puts on some clothes, and waits for her on the roof. The concrete is still warm from the heat of the day, and the air is thick and humid. She’s gone maybe half an hour, and then she’s back, flipping through the air and rolling to her feet in front of him. It still freaks him out, a little, that the blind girl he’d spent years guiding and protecting can do that.

“What’s going on?” he says, and it comes out angrier than he meant, but Mattie turns her head to him, and he recognizes that look on her face. It’s the one that sends chills down his spine, the one that says “don’t fuck with me.”

She stalks down the stairs, and he follows her. By the time he’s at the bottom of the stairs, she’s already pulling out the whiskey, and pouring two glasses.

“I heard - I heard a girl crying,” she says, taking a drink. “Down the block.”

“What was she crying about?” Foggy says, his stomach turned to lead, because it has to be bad for Mattie to have taken off like that.

“Her father was in her room,” she says.

“Oh, Jesus.” Foggy grabs the second glass.

“Yeah,” she says. “It’s just as bad as you think.”

“Did you find her?”

“Yeah. I’ve got an address. And an apartment number.”

Foggy imagines her prowling the halls of the apartment building, listening to _that_ happening while she tried to identify which door was hiding this horror show.

“Do you have a name?”

“No. I can go to the building tomorrow, see if I can grab some of their mail -“

“I’ll do it. Once we have a name, we can call Child Services.”

She nods, and drinks her whiskey, and Foggy has a horrible thought.

“Is it - is she still crying?”

Mattie cocks her head, listening.

“No. She’s asleep now.” And the fury in Mattie’s face is gone, replaced by sadness. Her hands are shaking as she puts down the glass, so Foggy covers them with his.

“We’ll take care of this,” he says.

The next day, Foggy finds the apartment building, and discovers that (for once) luck is on their side. The buzzers on the outer door are all neatly labelled with the tenants’ names, so Foggy types the name “McLennan” into his phone, and that’s his mission complete. When he gets home, Mattie calls Child Protective Services, then goes to sit up on the roof. She reports back to Foggy that the CPS has scheduled a visit the next day.

Mattie doesn’t sleep that night, and Foggy can’t blame her. He wonders if he should suggest getting earplugs, or playing music through headphones, but he knows Mattie well enough that he knows she feels somehow responsible for this girl, and would view blocking out the sounds of her abuse as some sort of shirking of that responsibility. So Foggy sits up with her, pours her whiskey, and watches her prowl around the apartment until it gets too much for her, and she runs up the stairs and into the night. He doesn’t ask where she goes.

They both stay home the next day. Foggy goes up with Mattie to the roof in the afternoon to wait for CPS, and for a brief moment, it’s a perfect day, sunny with a breeze, and Mattie looks beautiful in her summer dress, and Foggy thinks that maybe they should come up here and have a glass of wine sometime.

Then Mattie’s head turns sharply, and she says, “They’re here.” And for the next twenty minutes, he watches her face go from tense to horrified to incandescent fury.

“Mattie? Mattie, talk to me, what are they saying?”

“The mom…She’s saying it’s impossible. She doesn’t believe it.”

“Oh, no.”

“And she’s scared, the girl, I mean, she’s just saying what her mom wants her to say.” Foggy tries to reach out to her, but she bats his hand away. “They’re going, they’re just leaving, just like that. What the fuck?!” She slams the side of her fist down on the concrete edge.

“Hey, hey,” he says, trying to take her hand, but she wrenches away from him and barrels down the stairs. “Mattie, wait!” But she’s already grabbing her cane.

“Just - leave me alone, OK?” she says, and she’s out the door, and he’s left in an empty apartment. Unable to think of anything else to do, he winds up on the CPS website, trying to find anything else they can do.

“If a report is unfounded, it means that after investigation, there was no credible evidence to support the allegations in the report.”

Foggy wants to reach through his computer screen and strangle someone at CPS. Mattie’s hearing may not be court-admissible, but it’s unassailable to him.

Maybe he can submit another report? Or maybe they should call the cops tonight?

Mattie comes back as the sun is setting. She looks angry, which is to be expected, but also focussed in a way that reminds him of when she’d helped him fight Professor York back in law school.

“Hey, where’d you go?”

“Nowhere. Just walking,” she says.

“We’ll file another report. We can’t give up.”

“And while they investigate the next report, he’ll be hurting her,” she growls.

“There’s nothing else we can do, Mattie.”

“Yes, there is.”

And she’s pulling out her gym bag, unzipping her dress and changing into her workout clothes, and Foggy thinks that she’s going to go to Fogwell’s to work off her rage, but then he realizes that she’s putting on her wraps, and a horrible thought occurs to him.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking care of it,” she says, grabbing a scarf out of the closet and holding it between her hands.

“What does that mean, Mattie?”

She turns to face him.

“It means that I’m not going to spend another night listening to her cry.”

She isn’t heading for the door; she’s heading for the stairs. Foggy blocks her way, standing on the bottom step.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“What I should have done the first time I heard her. Get out of my way, Foggy.”

“What, you’re going to beat on him until he stops abusing this girl?”

“Zoe,” she snaps. “Her _name_ is Zoe.”

And the name hangs there in the air between them.

“You can’t do this, Mattie. You’re a lawyer, for Christ’s sake, you’re not some kind of vigilante! We can take care of this within the law -“

“The law can’t do anything to help her, Foggy! We tried, and we failed, and if I don’t do something, he’s going to come back tonight and hurt her again, and _I am not letting that happen!_ ”

“Why do you have to be the one to do something?!”

“Because I’m the one who can hear her!”

And she’s so desperate, so angry, that he gives voice to the terrible suspicions that he’s kept quiet ever since she told him about her childhood.

“What’s this really about, Mattie? Is this about Stick?”

“What?”

“Did he ever -“

“God, no! Stick never touched me, and I didn’t know that you had to have personal experience to want to _stop a child from being raped!_ ” She takes a breath, because they both know that was a low blow. 

“That’s not fair, Mattie.”

“We don’t live in a world that’s fair. We live in this one. Just let me go, Foggy, I can stop this.”

And that’s the choice. He can keep Mattie here, but a child’s abuse will be on his conscience. Or he can let Mattie go, and she’ll save the girl (Zoe, her name is Zoe), but at the cost of becoming something he’s not sure he’s ready to see.

He steps aside.

When she’s halfway up the stairs, he says, “Don’t kill him.”

She stops, and half-turns so that he can see her profile.

“If I kill him,” she says, “I won’t come back.”

And then she’s gone. The apartment suddenly feels too big, too empty, and Foggy feels like he’s falling. He sits down on the stairs and tries to steady himself, but the room is spinning, and he’s not getting enough air. The lightheadedness passes, but he stays on the stairs, trying to argue with himself over what just happened and the choice he made.

And his lawyer-brain can argue all it wants about laws and social contracts and civilized societies, but it can’t drown out the primal part of his brain that wants Mattie to make the bastard pay.

And neither of them can drown out the part of him that is screaming in terror that Mattie might kill this man. Not because he thinks the asshole pedophile deserves to live, but because he knows that it will destroy Mattie if she becomes a killer.

So he waits, and he prays to Mattie’s God to protect her.

He’s still sitting on the stairs when she comes back, hours later. The black scarf is wrapped around her eyes, and there’s blood on her hands and her face, and she moves like a predator, sleek and powerful and deadly. There’s a sensuality, an eroticism to her movement that he doesn’t recognize, and he shouldn’t think she looks _hot_ like this.

“You’re hurt,” he says.

“He’s worse,” she says.

He stands up as she stops on the step above him, so that they’re eye to blindfolded eye.

“Is he alive?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Good.” He reaches up and cups her chin, getting a better look at her split lip. “Is she safe?”

“Yes.”

He nods, because he still can’t bring himself to say that this was _good_ , but he thinks it might have been _right_.

“Let’s get you cleaned up.”

And she lets him take care of her, wiping away the blood and daubing her lip and knuckles with disinfectant. The dark, cold look on her face fades, and a small, satisfied smile appears instead as he works in silence.

“How are you doing?” he asks, because what else can he say?

“Never better,” she says, reaching out to him and brushing his cheek. And he thinks that he should be afraid, given what those hands have done in the last few hours. Her fingertips should be leaving trails of blood, but they’re just warm on his skin. “Foggy…”

He takes hold of her hand and pulls it away from his face, holding it in his lap.

“You scared me,” he says bluntly, and her eyes widen.

“Foggy, I’d never hurt you -“

“Not like that. I’m not scared of _you_. I was scared you weren’t coming back.” Her hand tightens around his.

“You can’t lose me that easy,” she says quietly.

“Promise me.”

She lifts his hand to her heart.

“Promise.”

And she looks so fierce, so strong, with her bruises and her blood, that he believes that she can keep that promise.

And when he can’t sleep, he stares at the ceiling and feels her nestled against him. It’s the deepest sleep he’s ever seen her fall into. No nightmares, no waking and brushing her hand over him to check that he’s still there, no pressing herself closer in tiny increments. Her arm is heavy on his chest, and her breathing is slow and even, and it’s the most peaceful he’s ever known her to be.

And Foggy remembers a girl curled against him in a twin bed, and he’d thought she was like a tiny kitten. 

She’s not a kitten anymore.

She’s a tiger, and he never noticed.

And Foggy listens to her sleep, and thinks he can love the tiger, too.


	14. For Better or Worse

August, Hell's Kitchen

“Done! Run your feelers over this little beauty.” Foggy is putting a napkin in her hand, and Mattie honestly can’t tell what the hell he’s trying to show her.

“What is it, a napkin?”

“No, buddy, this is our future.”

She runs her fingertips over the napkin. Foggy’s been writing on it for the past five minutes, and she can smell the ink, but she has no idea what’s on it.

“Huh, feels like a napkin,” she says.

“I thought you could - you know -“ Foggy waggles his fingers.

“I can with ballpoint. On paper. This feels…like a napkin.”

“Fine, it’s a drawing of a sign. ‘Nelson and Murdock, Attorneys at Law.’”

They’re celebrating their business loan being approved, which means they’re almost there. They can now start budgeting, finding office space, and, apparently, designing signs.

Mattie’s been waiting for the other shoe to drop for a week. Ever since the night she let the devil out.

“You - you really want to do this?” she says, because she’s knows that he should say no, he should run far away from her. She’s terrified that he will.

“No, I’m pissing my pants. There is actual urine in my trousers,” he jokes, and she laughs, wincing a little as it pulls at the split in her lip. “But I trust you. You think this is what we should be doing, then I’m with you. For better or worse.” And his heart tells her he’s not lying, but eventually, he’ll remember what she really is.

“Sounds like we’re getting married.”

“Why don’t we?”

For a moment, the world on fire disappears, and all she can hear is the beating of his heart.

“Are you - are you asking me to marry you?” she says. “In the middle of Josie’s?”

“Yes, which is why I’m not getting down on one knee, because the floor is gross, and I didn’t really plan this, so I don’t have a ring, but, I mean we’re already going to be business partners, we’re going to share everything with each other.” She hasn’t said anything, so he barrels on. “Our thoughts, our dreams, bills, crushing debt…”

Mattie almost forgets to pretend she doesn’t know where her glass is when she grabs it and downs it.

“C’mon,” she says, standing up.

“No, Mattie, don’t make that face. I know that face. Last time you made that face we wound up screaming at each other, and didn’t talk for a week.”

She leans over and kisses his cheek.

“And we wound up getting together. I just…I want to show you something. At home.”

As soon as they’re out on the street, Foggy asks the question she’s expecting.

“Is this another super-senses thing?”

“Sort of. Just…humour me, OK?”

When they get home, she puts her cane in its usual spot by the door, and leads Foggy in by the hand. As they pass the coffee table, she drops her glasses on it, then leads Foggy up the stairs, her stomach knotting around the whiskey she drank.

Out on the roof, the night is warm, and she can smell someone having a rooftop barbecue a few blocks over. She doesn’t know what the view is like, but she hopes it’s pleasant.

“OK, it’s the roof. We’ve been here before,” says Foggy skeptically.

“Tell me what you hear,” Mattie says, taking both his hands. Foggy hesitates. “Please?”

Foggy takes a deep breath, and goes quiet. He’s concentrating, probably closing his eyes.

“Cars. Sirens. People on the street. It sounds like there’s some sort of party that way.” He points. “A dumpster just slammed.”

“Do you want to know what I hear?”

He hesitates again, but says, “Go ahead.”

She steps back.

“There’s a guy catcalling two girls four blocks that way.” She points. “They just told him off, and he’s yelling at them now. I don’t think he’ll get violent, but he’s definitely scaring them.” She points in another direction. “Two guys just snatched a purse in Times Square. They’re going through it - she had a new StarkPhone, so they’re happy.” And another. “Drug dealer - beating on some junkie who tried to steal a fix.” And another. “Cops hassling a prostitute. She knows them, I think they’re going to try and get a freebie from her.”

“Mattie -“ His heartbeat has been rising steadily since she started talking.

“I hear this all the time, I’m the only one who can hear it, the pain, the fear, strangling Hell’s Kitchen. And for years, I buried my head and turned away. But I can do something about it, I can make this city a better place.”

“You mean go out again.”

“Yes. I want to. And I’m going to.” His heart is pounding, but she takes a step forward. “And I need you to know that. I need you to know that when you ask me to marry you, this is who you’re asking.” This is the truth that even she hadn’t known she’d been hiding, and it’s far more dangerous than any other secret she’s ever told him, because the others had made him angry for what she’d done, but this? This could make him hate her for what she is.

Except that he raises his hands to her face, and holds it between them.

“You think I don’t know who you are?” he says quietly. “I’ve known who you are since I was eighteen. Since _you_ were eighteen. The girl who wants to save the world? The one who fights for the ones who can’t fight for themselves? The tiny ball of rage? I know all about that. And I’m not afraid of you.” And his heart tells her it’s all true, and she thinks that maybe she can believe him.

“I love you,” she says, and she wants to say more, but he’s kissing her softly.

“So,” he says, breaking the kiss, “Matilda Michelle Murdock, will you marry me?”

“Yes.”

And he takes her to bed, and strips her bare, and tells her he loves her as his heart beats inside her.

A week later, they trek out to Queens to have dinner with Foggy’s parents; they moved out of Hell’s Kitchen after the Battle of New York damaged their apartment and destroyed their Midtown store. Edward and Anna are appropriately delighted at their engagement, and open a bottle of champagne. Edward pulls Foggy aside for a moment, and Mattie tries not to eavesdrop, so she focusses on chatting with Anna about wedding dresses and venues. 

Right before Anna is about to serve dinner, Foggy tugs Mattie out of the kitchen into the living room.

“I, uh, my dad gave me this. For you.”

He presses a small cloth bag into her hand. She can feel a hard circle inside it, and she pulls out a ring.

“It’s my great-grandmother’s. She left it to my dad, and I asked him for it. Because, you know, I can’t afford a ring, but I wanted you to have one, and I thought a family one -“

“Foggy,” she says, and she can feel her voice catch in her throat, and there might be tears in her eyes, “this is - this is better than a new one.” And Foggy knows, of course he knows, what this means to the girl with no family. 

It turns out to be too small, because years of striking training have taken their toll on her hands, but resizing is easy, and in a few days, she’s wearing it.

While they’re waiting for the ring to come back from the jeweller, she takes Foggy to Jack Murdock’s grave. She brings an apple like she always does (his favorite kind), and she tells her dad that she’s getting married, and that she’s happy.

When Foggy announces their engagement on Facebook, the first comment is from Jason Chan, saying, “Congratulations! What took you so long?”

They start looking for office space for Nelson & Murdock in the middle of all the engagement excitement, and while they’re eating lunch at a tiny counter in a hole in the wall shawarma place, Foggy takes that little breath he always does before he has something to say.

“What?”

“Still creepy.”

“Deal with it. What do you want to say?”

“I…OK, I absolutely do not have an opinion any way on this, and this is totally your decision, but have you thought about your name? You know, changing it, or hyphenating, or we could both hyphenate, I’d be down with that?” His heartbeat doesn’t waver through the whole speech.

“I don’t want to change my name,” she says. It’s her father’s name, and she won’t give that up, not even for Foggy.

“OK, that’s cool, just thought we should talk about it.”

She takes a bite of shawarma.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to screw up your sign,” she says.

Because they’re Nelson and Murdock. Anything else just doesn’t sound right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 2100 hits as of yesterday! Thank you, everyone, for all your kind comments and kudos!
> 
> We've only got one (short) epilogue to go, but...these two have eaten my brain. I've already got an outline for what happens to them during Season 1 into Jessica Jones S1, but I think I'm going to save that until after Season 2 comes out.
> 
> BUT I do want to keep my hand in for the next month while we wait for Season 2, so I'm thinking of doing a small collection of stories from the pre-S1 period that didn't quite fit into this structure. I've got a scene with Mattie meeting Steve Rogers that didn't make it in, and I want to write Marci something a little juicier, but what about you, Dear Reader? What would you like to see? Tell me in the comments! I'm open to all suggestions!


	15. Epilogue

September, Hell's Kitchen

They don’t plan the suit.

It starts with the mask. Mattie doesn’t go out in her hoodie after the first night because it’s just too hot, and Foggy insists that she wear something to hide her hair. (“You realize how much easier it is to identify you?”) So she cuts up an old workout shirt that Foggy assures her is black, ties up her hair with an elastic, and wraps the cloth around her face like a do-rag, covering her eyes.

“Yeah, everyone’s going to realize that you’re blind like that,” he says.

“The cloth is thin,” she says. “They’ll just assume I can see through it.”

Foggy’s not convinced, but he supposes it’ll do. He doesn’t tell her that it makes her lips look incredible.

Her shirt is next. Tank tops and t-shirts make her too vulnerable, and she comes back the first few times with her top shredded and scrapes on her back from rolling on asphalt. She finds long-sleeved compression shirts online, and Foggy suggests that she buy spares. The ones that arrive are black with red seams that look like veins. They’re tight, and with her sports bra on underneath, Mattie’s body looks different from that of Matilda Murdock, Esq.. Her shoulders look broader and her bust looks smaller, and Foggy thinks that anything that makes her less recognizable is definitely a good thing.

She buys gloves early on, and she always leaves her ring on the bedside table next to her glasses.

The boots come after she limps for a whole day, her toe swollen and bruised. She buys steel-toed boots the next day. Foggy doesn’t think about what the impact would feel like.

The pants are last. She wears her black workout pants for a while, but they start getting shredded too. She resists getting anything more durable, saying that she needs the flexibility, until he drags her into an army surplus store, and she falls in love with a pair of tactical pants. Luckily, they have them in black.

Foggy doesn’t ask for details when she goes out. Part of him reasons that he’s trying to maintain some sort of deniability, but the truth is that he doesn’t want to know what sort of danger Mattie puts herself in. He can see the toll it takes on her body; he disinfects her cuts and scrapes, ices her bruises, and brushes up on his first aid.

Because Foggy may love her, he may accept this as part of her that she _needs_ , he may even believe that what she does is necessary, but that doesn’t mean that he has to be happy with what she does when she goes out. So they tacitly agree that Mattie won’t tell him the real extent of the violence she does, and Foggy won’t tell her how much it scares him.

So it’s a little surprising that the first time she puts on the suit (mask, shirt, pants, gloves, and boots), he thinks she looks hot to _death_.

“Are you checking out my ass?” she says, halfway up the stairs. He’s still not quite sure how she knows; can a heartbeat really tell her that much?

“Believe me, that thing might be your secret weapon. It is seriously distracting.”

And she gives a little smile over her shoulder, and Foggy knows his heart skips a beat because it’s a beautiful sight, and the mask frames her mouth perfectly. Then she’s up the stairs, and out the door, and he loses her to the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew! This has been a really amazing experience, guys - your enthusiasm and support have been really overwhelming (especially since this is my first posted fic!).
> 
> The Season 1 adventures of Mattie and Foggy will be coming later in March. Until then, I'll be sporadically posting short scenes from pre-Season 1. Let me know in the comments either here or there (once they start getting posted) if there's anything that strikes your fancy! Want to hear more from Cathal? Want to see Pam and Mattie's first date? Want to know how Foggy and Mattie reacted to the events of Winter Soldier? Let me know!


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